Product Description

Maureen, a mental breakdown survivor, is about to end her affair with a married man when she discovers his body in her living room, his throat slit. Suspected of murder, Maureen must act fast - before the real killer comes after her.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #23817 in Books
• Published on: 1999-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 444 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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

From the Back Cover
Maureen O'Donnell wasn't born lucky. A psychiatric patient and survivor of sexual abuse, she's 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 friends, and the sweet balm of whisky. She is about to end her affair with Douglas when she wakes up one morning to find him in her living room with his throat slit.

Viewed in turn by the police as a suspect and as an uncooperative, unstable witness, Maureen is even suspected by her alcoholic mother and self-serving sisters of being involved. Worse than that, the police won't tell her anything about Douglas's death.

Panic-stricken and feeling betrayed by friends and family, Maureen begins to doubt her own version of events. She retraces Douglas's desperate last 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.

About the Author
Denise Mina
Denise Mina was born in 1966 in Glasgow. She worked as an auxiliary nurse in geriatric and terminal care nursing homes before studying law at Glasgow University. As an academic researcher she has written extensively on the medicalization of deviant women, and until recently she taught Criminology and Criminal Law. She lives in Glasgow, where she now writes full time. She is the author of four novels, GARNETHILL, which won the John Creasey Award for Best First Crime Novel, EXILE, RESOLUTION and SANCTUM.

Customer Reviews

FLOWER OF THE COWCADDENS
This story won an award for a debut crime novel, and I can well see why. Without wishing to suggest that it is `perfect' (whatever that is), I would say it is outstandingly accomplished and exceptionally readable.

I bought it on the strength of its title and absolutely nothing else. Garnethill is an area of Glasgow that I knew very well when I was young, and nostalgia is strong in Glasgow's émigré children. Apart from other factors, this city is full of unique and distinctive place-names, and I was looking longingly to hear them again. In fact the book has less of that than I expected, so I had to concentrate on the story. There is nothing distinctively concerned with Garnethill for one thing, but that makes a better title than, say, Springburn. One flank of Garnethill descends to Sauchiehall Street, the opposite flank to the Cowcaddens, but neither of these gets so much as a mention. If I had hoped to find some such statement as `A man was stabbed in the Gorbals' I did not find that either. The story is the thing, and quite a story it is too.

I liked basically everything about it. The dialogue and patois are distinctive enough to warm an exile's heart, but not so distinctive as to be unintelligible to anyone else. There are some very good lines here and there, most of them too indecorous for quotation in a review. It is all seedy stuff, what we used to call `kitchen sink' material back in the 50's. Being old enough to remember, say, Up The Junction, or A Kind of Loving, I started with a slight suspicion that we were meant to be shocked at such scenarios and goings-on, but happily that was just my own age showing and not the way the book is. In a sense it is pretty grim material, but for all the show of gritty unflinching realism the narrative has a sense of proportion, good taste and even a grimy dignity about it.

The characterisation is distinctly good in my opinion. I could recognise many or most of the types delineated, and there is a particular kind of brutality about Glasgow crime that came over to me very clearly, and that I hope will be recognisable to others lacking my own background, because the sense of it is captured with genuine perceptiveness and sensitivity. The real sleuthing is done by someone with rather an exceptional interest in finding the truth, miles ahead of the police in her thinking while not being any kind of genius, and a real down-to-earth personality rather than any specialist like Poirot or even Marlowe. The characters in this book are never boring or superfluous, but I'd say the best thing about the story is how well the narrative is paced. The identity of the killer emerges gradually and tantalisingly, known to the main participants before they mention it to the rest of us. What happens to the killer is then full of poetic justice and very satisfying, I thought, as well as highly original.

Not a page too long, it seemed to me as I waved farewell to them down Duke Street.

Excellent debut novel
The quality of the writing in this book is generally excellent. The author describes the seedier side of Glasgow with great skill, and she's not afraid to tackle some really unpleasant topics.

The mystery is handled very well, although I would have liked to have seen a bit more drama at the end.

Characterisation is very good, but it's here that I have my first problem. It's a common tip for new writers to give each of your characters a name starting with a different letter, or at least a name that sounds significantly different. In this book we have Liz, Lesley, Lynn and Liam. Okay, so the last one is okay (different sex), but you have to keep your eye on the ball to make sure you know who is doing what. I had to flip back a couple of times to work out who was who, which is never good.

However, minor niggles in an otherwise excellent book. I'm off to buy my next Denise Mina novel.

love at first word
I LOVE this book. the writing, characterisation & Glasgow burst off the pages & hit you right in the face. It made me dream of home. Why has Denise Mina not had the kind of high profile of other new young writers? She is far better than most.

Like all excellent writers of crime novels, she does not rely on over-egging violence, sex or co-incidence. Nor does she trot outthe the stale old stereo types who populate so much crime fiction today.

As an x-psychiatric nurse, she just plunged me right back in there....she will know exactly what I mean.