Childhood and School (1981–1999)

Anna Rosa Scavolini was born in Glasgow on 5 May 1981 to Francesco and Leah, children of immigrants from Italy and Germany respectively.

Growing up as an only child in affluent Kelvinside, Anna invariably preferred the company of adults – and, failing that, her own – to children her own age. A voracious reader, she formed many of the convictions she would carry into adulthood through her devouring of texts on philosophy and sociology at an age when most of her peers were still reading Enid Blyton.

From early on, she often clashed with her parents over everything from politics to religion to what constituted appropriate reading material for an eleven-year-old.

Anna attended Kelvindale Primary School (1986–1993), then Willow Bank Academy (1993–1999), a fee-paying secondary school in the West End, near Park Circus. It was on her first day at Willow Bank that she met Zoe Callahan, with whom she formed an immediate and lasting friendship.

On the face of it, Anna and Zoe came from sharply different worlds. Anna was bookish and from a privileged (if not quite upper-class) background; Zoe was a coarse-mouthed working-class kid from Ruchill who had zero intention of allowing the private education system to sand off her rough edges. But it was their very differences that drew them to each other. Anna admired Zoe’s lack of airs and graces, while Zoe valued the fact that Anna, unlike the other pupils, didn’t look down on her because of her background. Throughout secondary school, they were inseparable, whiling away hours at each other’s houses and, as they grew older, out on the town, often in defiance of their respective curfews.

As she progressed through school, Anna’s growing interest in the criminal justice system – particularly its impact on women – increasingly drew her towards the social sciences and into conflict with her parents, who were determined that she should pursue a well-paying career in economics or law.

As her fifth-year exams approached, Anna devoted herself wholesale to her studies, though she still made time to blow off steam with Zoe. It was on one such occasion that an event took place which would change her forever.

Rome (1999–2009)

Anna aced her exams, leaving her with her pick of university destinations. Determined to put as much distance between herself and her parents as possible, she chose the prestigious Sapienza University in Rome – swayed in no small part by its internationally renowned criminology postgraduate programme. In the autumn of 1999, she bade farewell to her parents, to Zoe and to Glasgow, and, armed with nothing but a single suitcase, set off to begin her new life in Rome.

The early years were undeniably tough. Refusing to countenance the idea of accepting support from her parents, from whom she’d parted on decidedly frosty terms, she took a series of service jobs to pay for her accommodation and living costs. Nonetheless, she flourished under pressure, drawing particular satisfaction from the knowledge that her accomplishments belonged to her and no one else.

Yet for all her academic success, a more private struggle had begun to assert itself. In 2002, during the final year of her undergraduate degree, Anna was diagnosed with bipolar I disorder following a prolonged period of severe mood swings. In retrospect, the diagnosis helped make sense of the extreme emotional ups and downs she’d experienced throughout her late teens and early twenties. Lithium helped to stabilise her mood, but the diagnosis left her feeling increasingly vulnerable, leading her to erect ever greater barriers against other people. This period also saw the collapse of a year-long live-in relationship with a fellow sociology student. Nonetheless, she graduated top of her year and remained at the Sapienza to undertake a PhD in criminology.

In the years that followed, she burned through a string of relationships, hinting at what she came to regard as a tendency towards self-sabotage. In late 2005, her father was diagnosed with oesophageal cancer and died early the following year after a sudden decline. Anna, who’d delayed returning to Glasgow on the assumption that she still had time, was consumed by guilt. Her mother, unable to face living in the same house she and her husband had shared for the better part of thirty years, sold up and relocated to Saint-Tropez for a fresh start. Anna’s failure to return in time deepened her already considerable rift with her mother, who believed Anna had put her studies ahead of her family, and communication between them all but dried up as a result.

 

Return to Glasgow (2009)

By the autumn of 2009, for reasons she couldn’t articulate, Anna found herself growing increasingly restless. Her research was published in widely respected international journals, she’d secured a tenured position in the Sapienza’s Department of Criminology, and she’d made a life for herself in Rome. And yet, she felt lonely and dissatisfied, with a barely acknowledged yearning for the life she’d left behind in Glasgow a decade ago. Most of all, though, she missed Zoe.

Over the years, the two of them had fallen out of touch, the twin hurdles of distance and Anna’s absorption in her work proving too vast to overcome. It was with considerable trepidation, therefore, that Anna picked up the phone when the caller ID lit up with Zoe’s old number one night in November. At first, she assumed it could only be bad news if Zoe was calling her out of the blue after so many years of silence. As she listened to Zoe’s familiar stream of verbal diarrhoea – as wonderfully uncensored and unrefined as ever – Anna realised that Zoe, seemingly bearing no ill will over the years of silence, was simply reaching out again. As the night wore on, she found herself telling Zoe all about her mental health problems, her isolation, the myriad stresses of work …

By the time they hung up, Anna had agreed to return to Glasgow the following month, in time for Zoe’s birthday and Christmas, to stay for as long as she liked with no strings attached.

A few weeks later, Anna stepped onto the platform at Queen Street Station on a bitter December night, back in Glasgow for the first time in more than a decade, blissfully unaware of the horrors in which she was about to find herself embroiled …

Anna Scavolini Mysteries