Paddy has a new mystery to go with her changing life

By Denise Mina

Little, Brown. 340 pp. $25.

Reviewed by Karen Heller

Denise Mina's

Field of Blood

introduced readers to the world of Patricia "Paddy" Meehan, a working-class Glaswegian copyboy, accidental sleuth in Thatcher's 1980s Britain, and intoxicating heroine.

The Dead Hour

followed. Paddy advanced to junior reporter and improved sleuth. She still enchanted, her determination, brutish humor and outsider status intact.

Mina has returned with

Slip of the Knife

, the third installment of a planned five in this stellar series. Now, it's 1990. Paddy is 27, a noted columnist with her own flat, a loving son (out of wedlock with a comedian), and, miracle of miracles, an accidental beau.

Minaphiles worry that such good fortune might ruin Paddy, a woman in a male profession, a Catholic in a Protestant land, working-class in an upwardly mobile environment, an aesthetic and often coarse mess in a culture rewarding female elegance and understated grace. Sustained success would mean a slow death for Paddy and her readers.

Fear not. Paddy's courage and black humor have always come from her fierce honesty (a self-professed "braying harridan"), proud detachment, plus a need to do right.

" 'You're fat and everyone hates you,' said Larry to her back, reminding her who she was supposed to be." She's her own worst friend. Her skirts are too tight and too short. She feels that almost every man is out to get her, and not for romance.

Slip

, like most mysteries, begins with an end, the brutal slaying of Paddy's former swain Terry Hewitt. He had escaped the shoals of Glasgow's ink-stained wretches to become a glamorous international reporter at work on a photo book. Now, he's become his former peers' subject, more carnage for the beast. Soon, the photographer's a corpse, too.

A secondary story begins with the end of Callum Ogilvy's prison term, for his role as a then- 10-year-old in

Field of Blood

's vicious murder of a child. Callum, the cousin of Paddy's former fiance, is a hulking man-child with a battered heart and an aberrant violent streak. Paddy, with a soft spot for society's rejects, promises to protect Callum from the glare of the press, though it means passing on a well-paying scoop.

If

Slip

isn't quite as wonderful as Mina's first two Paddy mysteries (she has written four other books, including the Garnethill trilogy), it has something to do with Cullum's central role. It's never wholly convincing that he won't harm again, especially as he's been locked up with miscreants for a decade, yet Paddy implicitly trusts him. The story's other weakness is a dated and obvious outfit behind the murder conspiracy and a rather unsatisfying resolve.

Still, Mina's a terrific writer. "Sister Tansy was alone behind the counter, her mouth perpetually a tightly drawn string bag," the cruel nun "one dry sherry away from committing a massacre." Paddy's former boyfriend George H. Burns - if she's so unlovable, how come so many men have loved her? - "had been confiding that his relationship was in trouble since she first met him, seven women ago. . . . What George Burns craved was to win over disapproving women. Temporary was an essential precondition of what he wanted."

The book's title alludes not only to death but to how quickly anyone might fall from grace. "She knew that with moral rigid laws all it took was a stumble on the path, a slip of the knife, unrepented, to put a person on the outside forever, looking in on their families and friends. Paddy herself had stumbled and slipped, scrabbling back but never quite making it."

With any luck, Paddy will meet greater, more surprising adversaries, the risks as great, the possible slips equal to her well-deserved happiness. Mina, too, should be welcomed by more readers, for her Paddy is a character to love.