Garnethill - Hardcover

Mina, Denise

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593043510 ISBN 13: 9780593043516

Publisher: Bantam Press, 1998

Synopsis

When Maureen, a hard-talking, hard-drinking Glaswegian girl, finally decides she is going to end her affair with a married man, she wakes up to a big surprise: she finds him in her living room with his throat cut. Viewed by the police as a possible suspect, she sets out to prove her innocence.

About this title

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

Review

Denise Mina has carved herself a niche as the queen of Glasgow noir and Garnethill is one of her best. (CATHOLIC HERALD)

Edition details

• Publisher: Bantam Press
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593043510
• ISBN 13: 9780593043516
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352