They`re the housemates from Hell…
When her disastrous Australian love affair ends, Lou O´Dowd heads to Edinburgh for a fresh start, moving in with her cousin, and preparing for the only job she can find … working at a halfway house for very high-risk offenders.
Two killers, a celebrity paedophile and a paranoid coke dealer – all out on parole and all sharing their outwardly elegant Edinburgh townhouse with rookie night-worker Lou…
And instead of finding some meaning and purpose to her life, she finds herself trapped in a terrifying game of cat and mouse where she stands to lose everything – including her life.
Slick, darkly funny and nerve-janglingly tense, Halfway House is both a breathtaking thriller and an unapologetic reminder never to corner a desperate woman…
It's such a pleasure to be hosting the blog tour for Halfway House today. Many thanks to Helen Fitzgerald, Orenda Books and Anne Cater from Random Things Tours for inviting me and for my advance copy of the novel.
Nobody writes pitch-black comedy thrillers quite like Helen Fitzgerald. Perhaps the most striking feature of her books is that she never plays safe with her lead characters. Sure enough, Lou O'Dowd might not be the sort of person you'd choose to be your best friend and I expect some of her life choices will have her labelled as unlikeable; however, for all her flaws, I absolutely loved her.
In Worst Case Scenario, Helen Fitzgerald used her own experience as a criminal justice social worker to write a brilliantly memorable novel about a middle-aged probation officer. She returns to a similar world in Halfway House but while Mary had seen it all, Lou is only 23, and manages to secure a job as a night-worker in a halfway house for high risk offenders in Edinburgh, thanks partly to a reference from her former sugar daddy's wife recommending her for 'demeaning care tasks in a dangerous setting.' The prologue has already revealed an intriguing young woman who is the focus of a Sixty Minutes documentary and the target of numerous opinions and hashtags. The main storyline then skips back to explain what brought her to this point.
Two months earlier she left Melbourne and the penthouse and allowance from her married ex-lover, Alan to start afresh. It's a rapid change in fortune then from her hungover arrival in the city, which finds her unable to stomach her first taste of chips with curry sauce and a can of Irn Bru, to her worldwide notoriety. Despite her many faults – she's selfish, unreliable and a liar – there is something rather vulnerable about Lou. She is utterly chaotic yet driven to almost compulsively clean up after others and the self-deprecating first-person narrative reveals a young woman whose nomadic childhood as an army brat saw her discard friends more quickly than she made them. She is determined to start again in Edinburgh and reconnects with her kind-hearted but somewhat sanctimonious cousin, Becks.
The halfway house of the title is home of sorts to an unsettling group of hardened criminals but the flat she shares with Becks is also a place which becomes filled with transient individuals as her cousin offers a bed to several of her fellow festival performers. Despite her best intentions, she understandably struggles living among strangers so far from home but she doesn't lose her eye for an opportunity and soon meets the recklessly charming Tim who shares her penchant for wild nights and daring outdoor sex. It's clear that Lou flirts with risk but it's also horribly obvious that she is out of her depth in the five-bed men's unit. She soon discovers it is not a well-run establishment and is barely shown the ropes before her first shock. As she learns more about the men who currently reside in the unit, she makes several bad judgement calls which eventually result in a night that spirals dramatically out of control.
Halfway House is a really funny book but it is also extremely dark; the men in the house are genuinely awful people. Helen Fitzgerald ably treads a difficult line perfectly here; she manages to describe these rather pathetic individuals with some empathy without ever minimising their horrific crimes or the impact of them, while also casting a sharp look at the way the public and media consume and glamourise violent crime.
It's not surprising that Lou should end up in desperate trouble and the compellingly exciting conclusion is a fitting ending to this winning combination of nail-biting tension, irreverent black humour and real heart. Halfway House is Helen Fitzgerald at her most irresistible, I read it in a day and highly recommend it.
It's not surprising that Lou should end up in desperate trouble and the compellingly exciting conclusion is a fitting ending to this winning combination of nail-biting tension, irreverent black humour and real heart. Halfway House is Helen Fitzgerald at her most irresistible, I read it in a day and highly recommend it.
Halfway House is published by Orenda Books and can be purchased directly from their website. Further publishing links can be found here.
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Thanks for the blog tour support x
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