Paddy’s different. She is overweight and bewails the fact, but eats too much of the wrong food anyway. A trendy bachelorette flat is as far from her ken as a guest bedroom in Buckingham Palace, since she’s saddled with a family of unemployed and unemployable persons who depend on her meagre salary. She also wears Catholic guilt round her neck like a millstone, knowing what is right from her warm, kindly, rigidly Catholic mother, but her flesh, alas, and to our delight, is weak She’s a junior reporter on the graveyard shift, hungry for the big story which is going to make her name – what she gets is drunken domestics and the occasional car crash, and the pleasure of working with big, hard drinking male reporters who are ridiculous and awful by turns, but somehow not loathsome.

‘The Dead Hour’ is a powerful thriller, fast paced, edgy with Glaswegian violence and poverty, and tainted with the smell of the home made soup and despair which comprises the air of the tough housing scheme she lives in. One night, there’s a domestic call out. Paddy glimpses a pale-faced woman whom she rapidly judges and ignores in a spasm of envy, while giving all her attention to the beautiful man who answers the door. He slips her £50 to keep the incident out of the papers. It is only later that she sees that the money is bloodstained. Shortly after she finds out that the pale-faced woman has been most brutally tortured and murdered. Her tracking down of the killer is obstructed by police corruption, the limits of her powers to investigate, and the puzzling mystery of why the dead woman did not call out for help, but Paddy succeeds – in a way, in the only way that is possible in the real world, which is to say partially – due to her dogged determination and refusal to give up.

Real world is perhaps the description that best suits Mina’s work. There are no superheroes here, nor super villains either, only frighteningly fragile human beings (or terrifyingly brutal ones) who struggle on, not always sure of what is happening, nor always having a solution even if they do know. The plot is interesting and lively, but the real strength of the book is in characterisation, and in the multitude of vivid scenes set in Glasgow.

Who could fail to cringe at Paddy’s mother’s idea of a treat – ‘The All Priests Holy Roadshow’. Yes, it really is a performance by priests trying to entertain their Catholic flock. One of them dresses like Elvis and the audience of women with ”bladders weakened by childbirth” lap it up. Trisha, Paddy’s Mum, loves it. Paddy loves Trisha, but has vague rebellious thoughts … mother is rigid in the Irish Catholic way – disapproves of premarital sex, shelters her other daughter from her violent husband, but will not countenance divorce or separation. Paddy knows this is wrong, and is devoured by fear for her sister, but can only helplessly throw her arms around her mother and declare that she will never be as good a woman as she is. Mina’s gift is to have us share Paddy’s ambivalence about this narrow minded loveable woman. It is the small detail which works that trick. Trisha, small, unsure, and vulnerable when she has to come into the city dressed in her shabby good coat, brings Paddy, who is in hiding, a serving of her home made soup. Suddenly, we feel what Paddy feels for her.

Mina spares her heroine nothing. She dresses herself from the rails of a charity shop; she hands her £50 note into the police, but in cringe-making scenes, insists that she must have it back later, bloodstains and all. She also has an excruciating one-night stand with a cocky married police officer. She only meant to introduce him to an amateur stand up comedian’s club because he has a little talent and because he is useful! (That combination of craftiness and impulse makes Paddy what she is.) She knows the sex here is wrong, but the likelihood of a ‘real relationship’ with anyone is barely there, and her ex boyfriend Sean has a new fiancée, so she takes what she can get in a car on an industrial wasteland. . And you just know it’s going to end badly. It is a strange fact that for all her errors and flaws, the reader must feel protective of Paddy – she’s young, she’s desperate, she has so much to contend with. She’s focused enough to make headway through a swamp of murder and intimidation, but not focused enough to avoid making her train wreck life worse.

Roll on the third volume of the series, Denise Mina - Paddy’s in deep trouble at the very end of the book and I’m worried about her.

Marion Arnott lives in Paisley, Scotland. She was winner of the Phillip Good Memorial Prize For Women's Fiction 1998, CWA Short Dagger 2001 and shortlisted for CWA Short Dagger 2002. Work has appeared in Scottish Child, West Coast, Solander Magazine, Peninsula , QWF, Hayakawa Mystery Magazine (Japan), Books Ireland, Northwords, Chapman, Crimewave, and Datlow and Winding's Year's Best Fantasy and Horror volume 15. Her short story collection 'Sleepwalkers,' was published in August, 2003 by Elastic Press. To visit Marion's Showcase on this website, click here

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.