Very well done. Certainly not a cheery book, but I was easily drawn into the story and enjoyed it. I always like it when an author isn't afraid to show characters with all their imperfections.

This mystery starts with a bang and never lets up. Maureen finds her boyfriend, Douglas, murdered in her apartment when she wakes up from a night of pass-out drinking. Hungover, and nauseated and sickened from his brutal slaying, she must navigate the police, her family, friends and work. Douglas and Mauri were on the outs lately, since Mauri discovered that he was married. Douglas was a decent man though and Mauri needs to know what happened. Her own mother, Winnie thinks Maureen did it, but fo...

Denise Mina is a true treasure of a discovery. Her books are primarily set in or around Glasgow, and remind me very much of Ian Rankin's Rebus series. Her protagonists are all female, most of them of the Irish minority in Glasgow, poor, and heavy drinkers. They do seem to have a gift for finding themselves in incredibly awkward situations. But Mina has an wonderful gift for characterization. Every person in these books lives and breathes authenticity. I do love these books!!

Garnethill is a good example of a first novel in series that works and works well. The main character in this story is a young woman, Maureen O'Donnell. Set in Glasgow, Scotland, the back story finds Maureen in a mental hospital for a nervous breakdown (for reasons explained but which I will not go into here), and as this story opens, she's home again, with a job and in an affair with a married therapist named Douglas. Maureen didn't know he was married until just recently, and has decided to br...

This is the book that made me fall in love with Denise Mina. She's a terrific social commentator and does all the things good crime fiction should always do: talk about characters and how their lives are changed for the better or worse by acts of violence.

Intense, taut psychological thriller; many wounded, twisted characters with the desire to survive past and present tragedies. This book is well written and presents a very believable, gritty protagonist named Maureen; a victim of familial abuse that haunt her past and ignite her current lifestyle. Engrossing, hard to put down, but very disturbing in content.

I had heard a lot about Denise Mina, all excellent reviews so I had high hopes for Garnet Hill. I did like the book and would give it a rating of 3.5 stars. Not a book to blow off your socks, but a pleasant diversion nonetheless. The murderer is easy to deduce, but having said that, I look forward to reading the next book in the series.

A Solid First Effort - 3 Stars Having read some of Denise Mina's later works, I know her a good writer with vibrant characters. Knowing this was her first novel, I lowered my expectation. While I thought it was a good novel, it was by no means great. The story had sturdy bones but it was not always well fleshed out. Plot Summary After a drunken night with a friend, Maureen O'Donnell stumbles home and passes out on her bed. In the morning, she awakes to find her boyfriend, dead and tied up i

Well I wanted to try this series, and I did...A young Scottish woman from a severely dysfunctional background becomes involved in a murder which leads to the discovery that someone is abusing - mentally, physically and sexually - a group of very vulnerable woman in a 'care home.' Yes, Maureen - or Mauri - wakes up after a night of drinking to find her boyfriend - a therapist - murdered, tied to a chair in her apartment with his throat cut. She has a low-level job, and was recently released from

Maureen O'Donnell, the daughter of a severely dysfunctional family, has recently left the psychiatric hospital where she has been treated as a victim of sexual abuse. She lives in Garnethill, a suburb of Glasgow, and begins an affair with one of the therapists at the hospital, Douglas Brady. One night after working at her dead-end job, Maureen goes out with a girlfriend and gets seriously drunk. She stumbles home and falls into bed, failing to notice that her boyfriend, Douglas, has been brutall...

I'm not one to shy away from dark stories, but sheesh!--this one really went over the top in bleakness. Every character is either a drunk, mentally ill, or a sex abuser (or some combination of the three). It rains every day. Every sink is full of dishes, every bed unmade. The characters subsist on chips, whiskey, and badly brewed tea and coffee. Although there are flashes of witty writing, I got so bogged down by the unremitting dreariness that I skipped ahead to read the final chapters just to

I had mixed feelings about Garnethill. Mina is clearly a skilled writer and the story is well plotted, with some nice twists and tension points, and is particularly strong on characterization. It also has a nice sense of place and contextualisation with respect to incest, abuse, family feuds, friendship and mental health issues. The full complexity of Maureen as a character shines through. My problem was with Maureen, however. If there is a difficult path, she seems to take it. The story is set

I’m so glad this book is over. I couldn’t quit after I had read 2/3s of it. But I wish I had. I picked this one up after I read Conviction. THAT was an awesome book. I was so happy to find a mystery writer that had multiple books and such a unique way of writing. So I next read Still Midnight. It was a drudge to get through. But I didn’t give up! Hoping that I could relive the wonderful experience with Conviction.......I tried Garnethill. Another disappointment. But I would definitely recommend

I came upon the Garnethill series by Denise Mina as a suggestion from my carpool buddy. I had just finished reading Tana French's trilogy starting with In the Woods (fantastic!). I'm not typically a mystery/crime drama fan, but the Garnethill Series books are FANTASTIC! So good, and enjoyed my reading experience so much, I am working my way through ALL of Denise Mina's books (currently reading The Dead Hour).What the heck is going on in Glasgow?! I want to go there, visit so badly, but I'm afrai...

Wow. Just wow. This is enough to make you use some silly acronym like WTF when you’re rather more someone who would just like to use the explicit phrase. It was all going so well, I was thinking Wow just wow in an awesome way & then I got to the literal last page of this book & my head kind of exploded.If you're not into spoilers for this book, I am going to tell you what the last page says, so you know, consider yourself warned if you continue reading my fist-shaking fury.“’Far be it from me to...

Denise Mina is an author I’ve been meaning to read for quite some time. As a fan of British crime thrillers, I’m always looking for new authors to try, and Denise Mina is an author to have been mentioned many times in the past. Thus, I decided to dive in with the Garnethill trilogy.I’ll be completely honest and say I wasn’t won over by this one. I found this one very difficult to get into, and spent the start of the book forcing myself to work my way through it. In truth, the first half of the b...

Maureen O’Donnell is involved in an unsatisfactory relationship with her boyfriend. Maureen was a victim of incest as a child and she had recently been discharged from a psychiatric hospital after suffering a breakdown. Her boyfriend, Douglas, was a therapist at the hospital. Having decided to end this relationship, Maureen has a girls night out that is fueled with alcohol. She staggers home and collapses into an alcohol induced slumber. When she wakes up in the morning, she discovers her boyfri...

Wow. I could not put this book down.Denise Mina's first book is wonderfully dark, has all the grittiness of a Glasgow alleyway, ties in a dysfunctional and abusive family dynamic that plays into the story effectively and adds tension. Maureen is a tremendously likeable character, flawed and damaged but good at heart, and we are cheering for her throughout the book, hoping against hope things work out and she figures out the crime before she gets locked away.My heart broke a bit at the end, as th...

Garnet Hill is the first book in a trilogy, it won the John Creasey Award for Best First Crime Novel. The story is set in Glasgow and Millport, Scotland. A woman named Maureen O'Donnell finds a body in her living room, it is Douglas Brady, her married boyfriend. Maureen is a child abuse survivor and had spent time in a psychiatric hospital. The police suspect her and her drug dealing brother; Liam. Maureen launches her own investigation to clear her name and begins to question who her real frien...

This book proved to me that my newly found love for Denise Mina's books is not just because I fell in love with the Paddy meehan" character in the first book of mina's I discovered. Again, Mina created true, strong characters we care about. The number of main and supporting characters she's able to not only create and involve in the story but is also able to capture our emotion for is impressive. Another strong female lead in this series. Looking forward to the next 2 books.