Review: The Dead Hour

You can feel the Glasgow grit of Thatcher’s 1984 under your feet in Denise Mina’s second novel to feature young reporter Paddy Meehan. Paddy covers the night crime beat in her first real reporter job. She spends the bleakest hours of the cold, wet February nights roving the streets with her driver, Billy, listening for calls on the police scanner.

This night there’s a call to a wealthy neighborhood, a domestic complaint. In the drive are two gleaming BMWs. “Paddy didn’t know much about cars but she knew that the price of one of them would pay her family’s rent for three years.”

So when a woman with a bloodied face steps back out of sight and a well-dressed man offers her a bribe to go away, stuffing a blood- soaked fifty into her hand, Paddy takes it. The cops have clearly also been bribed, but the woman refused help and “fifty quid could solve a host of problems.” Paddy lives with her parents and the four siblings still at home and she’s the only one with a paycheck.

“In the time to come she would burn with shame when she remembered her absolute conviction that the bloodied woman in the mirror was nothing whatever to do with her.”

The next day Paddy learns that the woman, Vhari Burnett, a socially conscientious lawyer, has been murdered – and tortured first. Wracked with guilt and the fear of losing her job, she takes her bloodied bill to the cops.

Then another lawyer, a friend of Vhari’s, is fished out of the river, an apparent suicide. Paddy is not so sure and begins digging, driven by ambition, conscience and fear of unemployment. A fear which looms bigger than ever when her boss is sacked in favor of a budget- slashing, tabloid-style shark of an editor.

“The moment she stepped into the newsroom Paddy knew some terrible, seismic shift had occurred. The last pages of the paper had gone to stone but instead of the usual hemorrhage of staff the newsroom was full of people behaving as if they were extremely busy.”

Meanwhile, point of view shifts intermittently to secondary characters, particularly Vhari’s coke-addled sister Kate who has always skated by on her beauty. But the coke has driven her too far, eroding her mind along with her face, and her twists and turns of increasing desperation are riveting and horrifying to see.

Mina weaves together the multiple strands of her story - murder, drugs, police corruption, poverty, class dynamics – with a sense of ruthless menace and edgy suspense leavened with Paddy’s energy and sardonic, sharp, defensive humor.

Paddy is a wonderful character – good to her mother and close to her noisy, hapless family and ex-fiancé. Smart, funny, resourceful and brave, she is also acutely, miserably aware of her cheap clothes and excess weight, sure she’d be on a big city (London) paper in a few years if only she wasn’t so poor and fat.

Mina, a colorful, muscular writer, has got a real winner with Paddy and readers will hope she doesn’t grow up too fast.

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Lynn Harnett

Book Review: The Dead Hour