Garnethill [Paperback]

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.

A stylishly written, highly suspenseful murder mystery set in Glasgow.

Maureen O’Donnell wasn’t born lucky. A psychiatric patient and a survivor of sexual abuse, she is stuck in a dead-end job and a secretive relationship with Douglas, a shady therapist. Her few comforts are making up stories to tell her psychiatrist, the company of her friends, and the sweet balm of whisky. She is about to put an end to her affair with Douglas when she wakes up one morning to find him in her living room with his throat cut. Viewed in turn by the police as a suspect –- aided and abetted by her drug-dealing brother Liam – and as an unco-operative, unstable witness, even Maureen’s alcoholic mother and self-serving sisters are convinced of her involvement. Worse still, the police won’t tell her anything about Douglas’s death, or what the killer left behind in her hall cupboard. Feeling betrayed by friends and family, Maureen begins to doubt her own version of events. Panic-stricken, she sets out to retrace Douglas’s last, desperate days and picks up a horrifying trail of rape, deception and suppressed scandal at a local psychiatric hospital where she had been an inmate. But the patients won’t talk and the staff are afraid, and when a second brutalized corpse is discovered, Maureen realises that unless she gets to the killer first, her life is in danger. This is a breathtaking and compelling piece of crime fiction. Shocking, insightful and shot through with black humour, Garnethill marks the arrival of a powerful new voice, remarkable not only for its grit and candour but for its sensitivity and compassion.

As an academic researcher, Denise Mina has written extensively on the medicalization of deviant women, and until recently she taught criminology and Criminal Law. She is the author of Garnethill, for which she won the John Creasey Award for best first crime novel in 1998, Exile, Resolution and Sanctum. She lives with her partner and young son in Glasgow.