DENISE MINA – Field of Blood. Little, Brown; hardcover, July 2005; Bantam, pb, April 2006.

       — The Dead Hour. Little, Brown; hardcover, July 2006; Back Bay Books, trade pb, February 2008.

       — Slip of the Knife. Little, Brown; hardcover, Februray 2008. First published as The Last Breath (UK, Bantam Press, 2008).

    I thought that Denise Mina’s Garnethill (Carroll & Graf, 1999) marked the debut of a outstanding crime writer. I was less taken with her stand-alone novel Deception (Little, Brown, 2004). But her new series with neophyte reporter Paddy Meehan has, for me, validated the promise of her early work.

    Paddy, a bright young woman obsessed with a negative self-image, establishes a tentative hold on the bottom rung of the journalistic ladder in a small Scottish newspaper in Field of Blood, her first appearance, while in The Dead Hour she has risen to full-time employment on the night shift, hoping to get the story that will gain her the respect of her colleagues, and make her career.

    She lucks into it but with bent cops trying to effect a coverup and both Paddy’s life and career on the line, she follows leads that could prove her suspicions or kill her.

    In Slip of the Knife she’s achieved her journalistic ambition with a position as a newspaper columnist that brings her recognition if not the complete personal satisfaction that is the more elusive goal. When she learns that a close friend and sometime lover has been murdered and that she has inherited his scrubby estate, she finds she has also inherited his troubled history and deadly secrets that now threaten her.

    This still developing series has the drive of the early Rankin Rebus outings, with a potentially self-destructive protagonist who rivals Rebus in her ability to court disaster without falling prey to it. She may not ask for the reader’s attention, but the power of her narrative voice demands it.