Garnethill

Author(s): Denise Mina

Location(s): Glasgow

Genre(s): Thriller

Era(s): Modern

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. 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

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