Garnethill
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3.8 • 10 Ratings
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
From its opening pages, this winner of the 1998 John Creasy Memorial Award for best first crime novel pulls readers inexorably into the tortured world of sexual abuse victims and their struggle to survive as whole people. Eight months after spending almost half a year in a Glasgow psychiatric hospital devoted to treating sex abuse victims, Maureen O'Donnell is desperately trying to hold together her shattered life. Bored with her job at a theater ticket office and depressed because her affair with one of the hospital's doctors, Douglas Brady, is over, Maureen and a friend get drunk. The next morning Maureen finds Brady's body in her living room, his throat cut. With bloody footprints matching Maureen's slippers at the scene, Detective Chief Inspector Joe McEwan sets out to prove the woman's guilt. He's not alone in thinking her the culprit: to Maureen's shock, both her alcoholic mum and Douglas's politician mother also think she's the killer. Convincing them that she isn't becomes her goal. She picks up a rumor about one of the hospital therapists having sex with a patient and learns that, before his death, Douglas gave formerly hospitalized victims large sums of money. Maureen begins to suspect Douglas's killing is connected to the hospital's clinic. Did a relative of a molested client kill Douglas? Or was the deceased about to turn in a colleague who raped patients? With sharp dialogue and painfully vulnerable characters, Mina brings Maureen's world of drug dealers, broken families, sanctimonious health-care workers and debilitated victims to startling life. Maureen's valiant struggle to act sane in an insane world will leave readers seeing sex abuse victims in a new light.
Customer Reviews
It had it’s moments
It was sometimes amusing and the story wasn’t bad but it was pretty drawn out and overly descriptive at times. Not her best work but still worth a read