Doug Johnstone’s Skelf series is a favorite of Auntie M’s and readers worldwide. The three generations of women in the Skelf family, who run a funeral home and PI agency out of their home, captured our attention with good reason.

He’s back with the fifth offering, THE OPPOSITE OF LONELY, and it’s another winner. Dorothy is the matriarch, who plays drums in a band, keeps the funeral home ticking over with an assorted crew she’s assembled from people who’ve needed her, and in this episode, as she plans to grow the kind of funeral the Skelfs offer, she adds to her crew. She’s also tasked with investigating a fire at a campground of travelers. What she unearths is terrifying.

Daughter Jenny works and lives at the house, after the dramatic events of the previous books. If you haven’t read them, you can read this now as Johnstone gives enough backstory for it to make sense, but then please do yourself a favor and go back to the beginning to watch a master author at work. The titles in order are: A Dark Matter; The Big Chill; The Great Silence; and Black Hearts. In this book, Jenny searches for her dead husband’s sister.

Granddaughter Hannah, married to Indy, the funeral home’s assistant funeral director, is completing her Phd in Physics, and has an opportunity to assist a female astronaut she admires when the woman complains of a stalker. She opens Hannah’s eyes to more than she bargained for, and puts herself in danger to do it for her idol.

The way Johnstone weaves these threads into one cohesive story, keeping an element of suspense alive, while imbuing the novel with pathos and emotion, is nothing short of masterful.

Along the way, he gives us an insider’s look to Edinburgh that has me aching to visit there again. I first came to know that city through Ian Rankin’s Rebus and then through other novelists including the wonderful James Oswald, who whet my appetite for a repeat visit, and Johnstone has just added to that urge.

Do yourself a favor. If you enjoy unique characters, tons of atmosphere, with a moving undercurrent and intelligent women protagonists, please read the Skelfs. I promise you’ll be a fan, too.