RESOLUTION

“Everything was coming to an end,” thinks Maureen O’Donnell glumly, and no wonder. As she waits for Angus Farrell, the psychologist who murdered her married lover, to come to trial, she’s uneasily aware that he’s smarter than her even when she’s sober, and certain he’s got some scheme cooked up to get off and perhaps convict her of assault for the LSD she slipped into his coffee. And Mauri can’t afford to get jailed and leave the baby her sister Una is expecting to the tender mercies of their abusive father Michael and their alcoholic mother Winnie, who’s still deep in denial about what Michael did to Mauri. Laboring to make the most of the few days before Una’s confinement, Mauri stumbles onto another equally dysfunctional family when she reluctantly agrees to help Ella McGee, a retired prostitute who shares space at the flea market where Mauri makes money toward her crushing bill for back taxes by selling contraband cigarettes. All Ella wants is a signature on the small-claims action she’s filing against the son and daughter who threw her off her job at their health club. But when Ella ends up in the hospital, badly beaten, Mauri realizes that Simon McGee is quite as dangerous, if not quite as cunning, as Angus Farrell.

Mina’s canvas is so broad, so teeming, and so relentlessly sordid that the biggest surprise in this final chapter in Mina’s not-to-be-missed Glasgow trilogy (Garnethill, 1999; Exile, 2001) is that she can pull off the climax her title promises.