“Garnethill”

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.

Taskuformaat