Denise Mina The Dead Hour

The Dead Hour

Denise Mina

Little, Brown, Jul 2006, $24.99

ISBN 0316735949

In 1984, Scottish Daily News twenty-one years old crime reporter Patricia "Paddy" Meehan arrives at an elegant house in the upper crust Glasgow suburb of Bearsden where a handsome man is talking with police officers McGregor and Gourlay. He informs her and the cops that everything is fine, that it will not happen again and that they prefer it kept out of the papers as he hands her a fifty pound note. Though the journalist remains concerned when she notices that political activist and lawyer Vhari Burnett's face is bloodied and bruised, Paddy agrees to remain quiet accepting the bribe as apparently did the cops too.

The next day Paddy feels guilty for her actions when she learns that Vhari was murdered; worse she feels incompetent for not seeing that the culprit had already knocked out Vhari's teeth by the time she arrived. Paddy feels she let herself down by selling out her ethics and vows never again while also pondering the reason Vhari failed to leave with them when she could. When the cops pull a suicide victim out of the river, Paddy sees a link between the two cases. She seeks that tie as a means to atone from her personal fall from grace.

Paddy's second appearance (see A FIELD OF BLOOD) is a fabulous investigative journalist whodunit starring a woman learning her profession on the job and in this case receives a powerful life and death lesson on ethics. The storyline is centered on Paddy's efforts to uncover the truth especially her theory linking the two deaths that her more experienced crime beat peers scoff at. Denise Mina writes a terrific Scottish mystery filled with a strong support cast, a gritty look at the city compared to a posh suburb, and an optimistic heroine who lost a strip of her idealism.

Harriet Klausner