Meet Martha. It's the first day of her new job as an intern at
Edinburgh's The Standard. But all's not well at the ailing newspaper,
and Martha is carrying some serious baggage of her own.
Put straight onto the obituary page, she takes a call from a former
employee who seems to commit suicide while on the phone, something which
echoes with her own troubled past.
Setting in motion a frantic race around modern-day Edinburgh, The Dead
Beat traces Martha's desperate search for answers to the dark mystery
of her parents' past. Soundtracked by and interspersed with a series of
gigs from the alternative music scene of her parents' generation in the
early '90s, Doug Johnstone's pause-resister is a wild ride of a thriller
and a perfect follow-on to his number-one Kindle best seller, Hit &
Run.
Doug Johnstone is the author of five novels, most recently the acclaimed
Gone Again. He is also a freelance journalist, a songwriter, and a
musician and has a PhD in nuclear physics. He lives in Edinburgh.