Exile
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3.4 • 7 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
The last time Maureen O'Donnell saw Ann Harris, she was sitting in her office in the Glasgow Women's Shelter smelling of a long binge on cheap drink. A month later Ann's mutilated body is washed up on the banks of the Thames. No one, except for Maureen and her best mate, Leslie, seems to care about what has happened to her, and Maureen is the only person who thinks Ann's husband is innocent.
But solving Ann's murder comes as light relief for Maureen. Her father is back in Glasgow, living in an area overlooking her bedroom window; Leslie is sloping about like a nervous spy; and then there's Angus - Maureen's old therapist - who's twice as bright as she is and making her play a dangerous game with the police.
In the long tradition of Scots in trouble, Maureen runs away to London. Looking for answers to the mystery surrounding Ann's death, she becomes embroiled in a seedy world of deceit and violence. Alone and vulnerable in a strange city, Maureen starts to piece together Ann's final days. But time is not on her side, and Maureen needs twelve more hours, just twelve, to put things right, and she doesn't care what it costs...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Following her Creasy Award-winning debut, Garnethill (1999), Mina delivers a second powerful novel with the same self-destructive characters, notably protagonist Maureen O'Donnell, and the same grim, gritty British locales. Maureen, while working at a shelter for abused women in Glasgow, gets pulled into the search for a missing shelter client, Ann Harris, the wife of her friend Leslie's feckless cousin, Jimmy. When Ann's mutilated corpse turns up in the Thames, Maureen agrees to go to London to investigate for Leslie, in part to escape her depressing life, burdened by flashbacks to her lover's murder, fights with her new boyfriend, a job she dislikes, estrangement from her alcoholic mother, and a long-absent abusive father whose sudden return frightens her and haunts her dreams. In seedy Brixton, a closed and suspicious community where grungy exile Glaswegians deal dope and brutalize one another, Maureen soon discovers to her peril that Ann was running dope and money between London and Glasgow for a violent criminal. All the characters are richly drawn, though especially brilliant are Mina's depictions of the forlorn JimmyDunemployed, hapless, lovingly caring for his four "weans"Dand of the ambivalent Maureen, aggressive and needy, independent yet desirous of affection, confident of the future but unable to purge the demons of her past. This is the second in a planned trilogy by a writer of stunning talent and accomplishment.
