Book description
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' death.
Panic-stricken and feeling betrayed by friends and family, Maureen
begins to doubt her own version of events. She retraces Douglas'
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 brutalised corpse is discovered, Maureen realises that
unless she gets to the killer first, her life is in danger. Denise
Mina was born in Glasgow in 1966. Because of her father's job as an
engineer, her family moved twenty-one times in eighteen years from Paris
to the Hague, London, Scotland and Bergen. After leaving school at
sixteen and a run of poorly paid jobs, she went on to study Law at
Glasgow University and researched a PhD thesis at Strathclyde. Misusing
her grant, she stayed at home and wrote her first novel, Garnethill,
which was published in 1998 and won the Crime Writers' Association John
Creasy Dagger for best first crime novel. Since 1998 she has written
seven further novels, including most recently, Still Midnight. She also
writes comics and in 2006 wrote her first play, 'Ida Tamson' . As well
as all of this she writes short stories and is a regular contributor to
TV and radio.
