Tombstoning: The darkly funny, gripping debut mystery novel

About this book

As Independent Scottish booksellers, we write all of our descriptions personally, we hope you enjoy this one.

Fifteen years ago, David Lindsay’s best mate fell from a cliff in mysterious circumstances, and David was the last to see him alive. He did what felt easiest, and maybe necessary. He ran, and he did not go back to Arbroath.

Now another death pulls him home. Nicola Cruickshank, the girl he always fancied and never had the guts to speak to, asks him to return for a school reunion, at the very place it happened. David tells himself he is going for Nicola, not for the past, but the past has its own grip.

When someone else tumbles from the cliffs, in what the locals now call tombstoning, David is forced to choose between flight and reckoning. Returning does not bring closure. It brings a fresh set of questions, and the uneasy sense that what happened fifteen years ago is still shaping who gets to live, and who does not.