The Dead Hour

Starred review from May 8, 2006
Set in Glasgow in 1984, Mina's riveting second thriller to feature Patricia "Paddy" Meehan (after 2005's A Field of Blood
) opens with the 21-year-old crime reporter for the Scottish Daily News
following up a late-night disturbance complaint at a Victorian villa in the posh suburb of Bearsden. The tall, attractive man at the door assures Paddy, as he had the police, that the incident won't happen again. Behind him is a blond woman with a bloody face—Vhari Burnett, a well-respected political activist and lawyer. The man bribes Paddy, as he had the police, to keep quiet. The next day the news of Vhari's murder dismays the normally scrupulous Paddy. When a suicide is fished out of the river, Paddy begins to connect the two deaths. Meanwhile, Vhari's cokehead sister, Kate, is on the run from Vhari's killer, and Mina skillfully alternates Kate's desperate point-of-view with that of Paddy, who's determined to do the right thing and bag the story. Hopefully, this won't be the last breathless adventure for one of the most entertaining reporter sleuths in recent crime fiction. 6-city author tour.

June 15, 2006
On her rounds as a crime reporter for the "Scottish Daily News", Paddy Meehan visits the scene of a disturbance at a home in Beardsden, a wealthy suburb of Glasgow. There she finds an attractive couple who appear to be in the midst of a domestic dispute. The police give the couple a warning and, as they are leaving, the man presses a 50-pound note into Paddy's hand and asks her to keep the matter out of the paper. The next morning Paddy reads in the paper that the woman, a lawyer and political activist, has been murdered. The man was not her husband. Suddenly, Paddy has to confront the class prejudices that allowed her to leave another woman in a dangerous situation and decide what to do about the money she accepted from the murderer. Despite its intriguing premise, Mina's ("Deception") crime plot never picks up much momentum, but Paddy Meehan is a refreshingly down-to-earth character, and her travails in the nightworld of Glasgow ultimately make for a more compelling story than the murder she tries to solve. Readers never get to know the murder victim very well, and the details of her death unfold rather anticlimactically. Recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 3/15/06.]" -Jane la Plante, Minot State Univ. Lib., ND"

Copyright 2006 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2006
During the bleak Thatcher era, Paddy Meehan, night cops reporter for the " Scottish "Daily News, is a sensitive, self-consciously overweight young woman competing for bylines with hard-bitten, middle-aged men. And it's just her bad luck to turn up for an apparent domestic-disturbance call at a posh residence where the cops take a bribe from the man who answers the door. Paddy sees a battered woman behind him and manages to ask a few questions before the man presses a large, blood-soaked bill into her hand and slams the door before she can return it. She writes up the story anyway. But when the woman turns up dead, guilt-wracked Paddy reports the attempted bribe to the cops and frets about losing her career when word reaches her editor. In the meantime, she'll open her own dogged investigation into the murder. In her second outing, Paddy holds up as a refreshingly realistic character that readers will eagerly embrace--warts, neuroses, and all. Mina also provides a gritty, authentic look at daily journalism's sausage-making process.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2006, American Library Association.)