Then, one morning, she wakes up to find Douglas in a chair in her living room with his throat slit. She’s holding down a job in a ticket office, self-sufficient enough to be able to live on her own in a flat at the top of Garnethill, and has recently decided to dump her boyfriend, therapist Douglas Brady, after discovering that he is in fact married. At the start of the first novel, Maureen is on the mend. Only her older brother, Liam, who makes a living peddling drugs, stands by her, and as a result the rift that has developed between these two factions of the O’Donnell clan is immense to say the least. However, her attempts to get her family to admit what had happened to her as a child fall on deaf ears, with her alcoholic mother seemingly repressing her own memories and her two sisters flat out refusing to believe Maureen’s version of events. Years later, as a History of Art student at Glasgow University, she suffered a nervous breakdown as her repressed memories of the attack resurfaced and was, for a while, institutionalised. As a child, she was abused by her father, culminating in what she later comes to suspect was a rape attack, an event which she blocked out for over a decade and which led to her father disappearing abruptly. The central protagonist of the trilogy, Maureen O’Donnell, has not had what you’d call a happy life.

(The title refers to a residential area in the centre of Glasgow, most famous for the Glasgow School of Art.) These roots are very much in evidence throughout what is semi-officially referred to as the Garnethill trilogy, encompassing three books published between 19: Garnethill, Exile and Resolution. Prior to writing her first novel, Denise Mina researched a PhD on the ascription of mental illness to female offenders and taught criminology at Strathclyde University. Review: the Garnethill trilogy (long post)