Deception

I read Denise Mina's Garnethill trilogy a while back, and was very impressed. And I bought a couple of other of her books, but I never got around to reading them, I think because I somehow felt like they'd be a rehash -- by the end, it felt like she'd mined the particular vein she was working dry.

It turns out I was only half-right. Deception is written in such a different voice from Garnethill that there's no worries about repetition. The main character, Lachlan Harriott comes across as vain, arrogant, but at the same time downtrodden -- very much the opposite of Maureen, the heroine of Garnethill, who was a much more empathetic character. I thoroughly enjoyed the novel, even if Lachlan himself is an insufferable prick.

But what to make of the frame story? The very end of the main story suddenly veers off into wild coincidence, and then Mina implies that possibly none of this happened -- Lachlan is a completely unreliable narrator. Did she feel that the story was weak, but it needed some sort of closure? The ending is clearly weak, and maybe the framing story is there to make up for that.