Book review: Halfway House, by Helen FitzGerald

Set in Edinburgh during Festival time, and telling the story of a young Australian woman who takes on a job she’s seriously unqualified for, Halfway House is a pacy, engaging and at times darkly funny read, writes Kirsty McLuckie

What’s a young Australian woman to do when her affair with a married man ends disastrously? If you’re Lou O’Dowd, the protagonist of Helen Fitzgerald’s latest novel, Halfway House, the answer is simple. She moves to the other side of the world, to Edinburgh – a city that she has some very unrealistic romantic ideas about, and takes a new job as a night warden in a halfway house for high risk offenders.

To be fair, with little prior work experience except that of being a kept woman, she didn’t have many options. Asking her ex-lover for a reference produced a recommendation from his disgruntled wife, suggesting Lou is eminently suitable for demeaning care tasks in a dangerous setting. Presumably being locked in overnight with two murderers, a celebrity paedophile, a drug dealer and a serial flasher is just what she had in mind.

Lou herself is blasé about the risks – and thinks only of the shift pattern, which will leave her with plenty of time off to explore Scotland. But her plans go immediately and disastrously wrong in this darkly funny novel.

It is difficult to pin down the genre of this book – is it a bubbly romance, a classic farce or a tense thriller which leaves you guessing to the end? Actually it’s all of them, and it sometimes zips along at such a pace that you are in danger of missing some of FitzGerald’s very good jokes.

The action takes place in August, and Lou’s cousin and flatmate, Becks, can’t help taking in fellow antipodean festival performers who have fallen on hard times. We meet Cam the unwashed from Canberra, a depressed comedian staging a one-man show; Giuseppe, who is kipping on the sofa; an 80-year-old performer who constantly has to be reminded to take her medication; and a bloke called Barry, who is sleeping on a mat next to Lou’s bed. Becks herself is putting on her own show, Plath! The Musical, which Lou sleeps through before heading to a monologue on endometriosis.

Meanwhile, Lou’s ideas of fairytale Edinburgh are swiftly knocked out of her during her first shift at the halfway house. FitzGerald draws on her own experience as a criminal justice social worker to give an idea of the nature of the job. The housemates are dangerous, devious, perverted and unhinged, and with very little preparation or training she is left alone with them, to argue about tidying, night curfews and inappropriate behaviour. Things go downhill rapidly, then get out of hand, and a violent standoff is the result.

Our heroine is inept, amoral and naive, but she’s also a spunky Sheila, which makes Halfway House a very engaging read.

Halfway House, by Helen FitzGerald, Orenda, £9.99