The Dead Hour - Tapa dura

Acerca del autor

As an academic researcher, Denise Mina has written extensively on the medicalization of deviant women, and until recently she taught criminology and Criminal Law. She is the author of Garnethill, for which she won the John Creasey Award for best first crime novel in 1998, Exile, Resolution and Sanctum. She lives with her partner and two young sons in Glasgow.

De la contraportada

DENISE MINA IS

'Really quite wonderful. It took only one book for me to become a true fan.' Michael Connelly

'Quite simply a must-read writer for anybody who thinks that crime fiction is as important as it is entertaining.' Mark Billingham

'One of the most exciting writers to have emerged in Britain for years.' Ian Rankin

'Set to carve a niche for herself as the Crown Princess of Crime.' Val McDermid

'One of the genre's brightest new stars.' George Pelecanos

De la solapa interior

Paddy Meehan, Glasgow's youngest aspiring journalist, cruises the dark city on a perpetual night shift, chasing police calls for a story to promote her out of a twilight existence that makes Mars bars and coffee a medical necessity. With her father and brothers unemployed, and her upright Roman Catholic family perilously short of money, she needs the work.

The domestic dispute at a house in a wealthy suburb seems like nothing unusual - at first. The blonde in the shadows bleeding from a head injury doesn't want any help; and the well-dressed man at the front door tells Paddy everything's fine, and that she should leave.

And then he slips her a crisp £50 note to keep the story out of the paper.

By the next morning the woman is dead; she's been tortured first, beaten, and left to die.The untraceable man was neither her boyfriend nor her husband, and Paddy can't understand why the woman passed up the chance to walk through the door and live.

Paddy's found the story she's dreamed about, but she'll lose all credibility if the word gets out about her bribe. The police who attended the call are twisting the evidence for reasons of their own. Only Paddy cares enough to pursue a dark and brutal truth that could make her career - or kill her.