The Dead Hour, Denise Mina, Little Brown, $24.99.

Denise Mina is one of the true artists of the mystery genre at the moment, following the path of other great writers like Ruth Rendell, Ian Rankin and Val McDermid. Because she is Scottish, the comparison to Rankin and McDermid is most obvious, but she shares Rendell's lack of sentimentality and incredibly inquisitive and ruthless eye for the details of human interaction. This is the second novel in her Paddy Meehan series, following a brilliant first outing, Field of Blood. In a Mina novel, nothing is what the reader expects it to be, and thus you are kept turning pages to find out what happens. The character of Paddy, a chubby young reporter who works the night shift (the "dead hour" of the title), chases the police radio all over the city with her driver, writing up paragraphs about car crashes, domestic traumas and other usually quotidian violence.

It's when Paddy stumbles into the unusual that her life takes a turn. She and her driver are called out to a "domestic" - when she gets there, the cops are at the door talking to the husband? partner? - of a woman Paddy sees only for a brief moment just inside the door, blood all down her cheek. The woman isn't pressing charges and the man at the door is pressing 50 pound notes into the hands of the policemen and Paddy herself. Paddy, who is the only one with a job in her crowded household (this is set during the Thatcher 80's), feels unable to refuse the money, and as the door is slammed in her face after it's put into her hand, she's not given the chance. When she finds blood on the note she merely practically thinks that if she lets the blood dry, her over stressed mother won't notice.

When the woman turns up dead things begin to accelerate, and Mina weaves in the story of Kate, who has stolen a huge amount of cocaine; the suicide of an apparently happy lawyer who had been a friend of the dead woman; Bernie, who owns a garage, and Paddy herself, who finds that if she can turn what she knows into a big story she may be spared the layoffs that are hitting many other people at her paper. Surprisingly Paddy also finds romance in an unexpected place, but her reactions and perceptions are so immature and sometimes off that her friendship with the man in question is difficult and halting at best.

Mina is a mystery writer, so of course the plot lines all intersect, but they seem so far apart at the beginning, it's the bringing together that provides the suspense and drama. Her writer's eye is a fine tuned one, and her portrait of a grim and impoverished Glasgow (one of the characters even says "I don't drive, I don't even know anyone who has a car", an unimaginable statement to an American) is completely indelible. If mysteries can take you completely out of yourself, there are a variety of ways they do it; one way is to give the reader a bird's eye view of a grimmer and different reality. In many ways it makes you reconsider your own life and your own luck (or lack of same). This is Mina's path to truth, and her portraits of the people inside the world she portrays are just as indelible. This is a very fine crime novel, which deservedly is nominated for an Edgar for best novel this year.

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British Mysteries

The Dead Hour, Denise Mina, Little Brown, $24.99.