- Paperback: 448 pages
- Publisher: Bantam; New edition edition (1 May 1999)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0553506943
- ISBN-13: 978-0553506945
- Product Dimensions: 17.5 x 10.4 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 293,131 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Garnethill (Garnethill 1)
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More About the Author
Product Description
Amazon.co.uk Review
It is, of course, the stuff of nightmares. Maureen comes home late and drunk and wakes up next morning with a hangover, and her boyfriend in the next room with his throat cut, and something nasty in the cupboard under the stairs. The police are aware of her earlier mental breakdown, and it is only a touch of finesse too far on the part of whoever framed her that convinces them to look elsewhere. Maureen is not the conventional woman in danger of Gothic, though, and the effect of all of this is simply to annoy her; there are, it turns out, people on whom it is ill-advised to pick.
Denise Mina has learned many things from Chandler and one of them is to have a protagonist who is wonderfully and spectacularly rude to people who irritate her. A cast of tough Glasgow characters that includes her drug-dealer brother and the biker from the Women's Refuge help her sort out a mystery that turns, crucially, on the way society despises, and will never listen to, those who have been stigmatised as mentally ill. This is a thriller which combines the intellectual excitement of investigation with an underlying polemical anger; it is a remarkably finished debut. --Roz Kaveney --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Book Description
A stylishly written, highly suspenseful murder mystery set in Glasgow.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
love at first word,
By bookhead "scs" (scotland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Garnethill (Paperback)
I LOVE this book. the writing, characterisation & Glasgow burst off the pages & hit you right in the face. It made me dream of home. Why has Denise Mina not had the kind of high profile of other new young writers? She is far better than most.Like all excellent writers of crime novels, she does not rely on over-egging violence, sex or co-incidence. Nor does she trot outthe the stale old stereo types who populate so much crime fiction today. As an x-psychiatric nurse, she just plunged me right back in there....she will know exactly what I mean.
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
FLOWER OF THE COWCADDENS,
By DAVID BRYSON (Glossop Derbyshire England) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
This review is from: Garnethill (Paperback)
This story won an award for a debut crime novel, and I can well see why. Without wishing to suggest that it is `perfect' (whatever that is), I would say it is outstandingly accomplished and exceptionally readable.
I bought it on the strength of its title and absolutely nothing else. Garnethill is an area of Glasgow that I knew very well when I was young, and nostalgia is strong in Glasgow's émigré children. Apart from other factors, this city is full of unique and distinctive place-names, and I was looking longingly to hear them again. In fact the book has less of that than I expected, so I had to concentrate on the story. There is nothing distinctively concerned with Garnethill for one thing, but that makes a better title than, say, Springburn. One flank of Garnethill descends to Sauchiehall Street, the opposite flank to the Cowcaddens, but neither of these gets so much as a mention. If I had hoped to find some such statement as `A man was stabbed in the Gorbals' I did not find that either. The story is the thing, and quite a story it is too. I liked basically everything about it. The dialogue and patois are distinctive enough to warm an exile's heart, but not so distinctive as to be unintelligible to anyone else. There are some very good lines here and there, most of them too indecorous for quotation in a review. It is all seedy stuff, what we used to call `kitchen sink' material back in the 50's. Being old enough to remember, say, Up The Junction, or A Kind of Loving, I started with a slight suspicion that we were meant to be shocked at such scenarios and goings-on, but happily that was just my own age showing and not the way the book is. In a sense it is pretty grim material, but for all the show of gritty unflinching realism the narrative has a sense of proportion, good taste and even a grimy dignity about it. The characterisation is distinctly good in my opinion. I could recognise many or most of the types delineated, and there is a particular kind of brutality about Glasgow crime that came over to me very clearly, and that I hope will be recognisable to others lacking my own background, because the sense of it is captured with genuine perceptiveness and sensitivity. The real sleuthing is done by someone with rather an exceptional interest in finding the truth, miles ahead of the police in her thinking while not being any kind of genius, and a real down-to-earth personality rather than any specialist like Poirot or even Marlowe. The characters in this book are never boring or superfluous, but I'd say the best thing about the story is how well the narrative is paced. The identity of the killer emerges gradually and tantalisingly, known to the main participants before they mention it to the rest of us. What happens to the killer is then full of poetic justice and very satisfying, I thought, as well as highly original. Not a page too long, it seemed to me as I waved farewell to them down Duke Street.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
"What was in the cupboard?",
By
This review is from: Garnethill (Paperback)
Robust action and strong motivations are a feature of this excellent crime novel. If you are easily made nauseous then you might have a problem with some of the violence. But this is Glasgow and Maureen, our protagonist has seen more than most when it comes to family miseries. It may be, though, that Maureen is stronger than she seems when it comes to defending others from the kind of horrors dealt out to those weaker than their tormentors.
The characterisation is top notch, which makes this a deeply involving read, with the unusual modus operandi of the non-cop investigator providing some incompetent - not to say disastrous - as well as some unexpectedly useful outcomes. Grit your teeth, stay with it, she gets there, fair wind or foul weather and it's definitely worth while.
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