1984

Glamour is a feature of distance. Paddy Meehan now has her dream job, as a junior reporter in The Scottish Daily News, working the night shift on the calls car. She and Billy, her driver, drift through the midnight city attending casualty wards and police stations, scavenging for stories.

It’s not the golden opportunity she’d hoped for. She’s so tired she can hardly write a paragraph  without the benefit of biscuits. Until one innocuous call about a noise disturbance in a posh area to the north of the city...

He’s handsome. That’s the first thing she notices. He’s well dressed, knows the policeman at his door and he’s not letting anyone into the house.

Up close, flirting with him, Paddy notices flecks of blood on his neck and collar. The door falls open behind him and Paddy catches the frightened woman’s eye in the hall mirror. Her blonde bob is stained with blood and she cartwheels the hair behind her ear, showing Paddy her bloody jaw and neck. He has done something to her mouth, something to her teeth. Paddy raises her eyebrows, inviting the woman to walk the two steps to the door and come with her, but the woman drops her eyes, shakes her head and steps back out of the mirror.

The handsome man takes charge. He presses fifty quid into Paddy’s hand to keep the story out of the paper and shuts the door on her.  The note is damp with blood but Paddy’s hand closes over it.

Not through a crisis of conscience but in case Billy saw the money and will think less of her, Paddy goes straight to a call box and phones the story into the paper.

The next morning the blonde is found dead. The attending police officers claim there was no man at the door and Paddy has published the story as a news in brief so everyone knows she was there. And the blonde- why did she stay? Why would anyone stay with a man who did that to them?

THE DEAD HOUR by Denise Mina

Following on from The Field of Blood, the first in the Paddy Meehan series, the Dead Hour takes Paddy through the cocaine - fuelled aspirations of the nineteen eighties, through the poverty and riches of the age, in a pair of suede pixie boots and a second hand green leather jacket.

Moving through the comedy scene and the upheavals in the print press, Paddy tries to carve a place for herself in a company of ner-do-wells and misanthropes without loosing her integrity entirely.

Watch out for the earth-shattering shock at the end.