The Dead Hour

Denise Mina
Little, Brown and Company (2006)
ISBN 0316735949
Reviewed by Rebecka Vigus for Reader Views (8/06)

Paddy Meehan works the police beat on the graveyard shift at the Scottish Daily News in Glasgow.  She lives at home with her parents, two brothers and a sister.  Hers is the only income for the five of them.  Times have been tough. Factories have shut down and many are out of work.  Paddy is not tall and rather wide in the hip.  She has spiky hair and wears second-hand clothes.  She, like others at the paper, is chasing that one journalistic piece that will bring her national recognition and a larger income.  That’s how she happens on a domestic disturbance in the Bearsden area. There is she is given fifty quid to overlook the call.

Vhari Burnett is an up and coming prosecutor.  It is her home in Bearsden where Paddy arrives.  The police officers also leave.  The next morning Vhari, an attractive blonde, is found brutally murdered.

While Paddy is talking to the police investigating the murder she finds the officers who took the call that night have identified someone else as the killer.  That someone is dead and cannot defend himself.  Paddy gives a description of the person she saw.

Meantime we have Kate, who is hiding and snorting coke.  She kills a man to keep herself from harm’s way.  Kate had the sort of looks “that caught the eye and kept it.”  Only the drug use had made her ugly.  She finds she is not welcome in places she had always been welcome in before.  She is running out of places to hide and the coke is disappearing.

While Paddy is working on the Vhari Burnett story, the management at the paper changes.  Now she has to worry about whether or not she will continue to have a job.  Can she find out who really killed Vhari Burnett and why?  Where did the BMW’s go?  Who is trying to kill Paddy? Why is she a target?  Is she getting to close?  What is Kate’s part in the murder?  Who is trying to kill Kate?  Why?

All this, and more, lie in the pages of “The Dead Hour.”  You won’t want to miss how all the pieces fit together. 

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