Melancholy, manic, gentle, hopeful. As grief affects people in different ways so do the women in the Skelf family deal with the legacy of trauma, betrayal and hurt.

 

The fourth novel in the series, in Black Hearts Doug Johnstone has once again delivered a wonderful blend of humour, mystery and reflection on the secrets of death and the universe.

 

While I find Jenny (the middle of the three generations of Skelf women who star in these books) the hardest to like character, I appreciate the author’s ability to show her self-destructive tendencies in the context of what she’s been through without ever expecting her behaviour to be excused.

 

While a series based around a family of funeral directors/ private investigators has naturally dealt with the aftermath of death before, the guilt of survivors and how people deal with trauma, is really at the centre of this instalment.

 

I was actually talking about this series with three women from my own family at a wedding last week. They’d all read at least some of the series based on my previous recommendation. A lot of the talk centred on whether the books were macabre. I do have another relative who read the first three back to back and then said they were too dark for her :-D. And, while I agree that objectively books focussed around a family who make their living from death feels morbid. The opening scene of book one, when the Skelf matriarch Dorothy has a funeral pyre for her dead husband in the back garden, is most often mentioned as an example of the darkness of the series. But, the thing that always impresses me in these books is how hopeful they feel. There’s no trite sense of closure to the solving of a mystery, but there’s a respect for the journey of grief that really makes this series stand out for me.