Paddy Meehan Books in Order

The Paddy Meehan novels follow a young woman coming of age in the noisy, sexist newspaper world of 1980s and 90s Glasgow. Paddy is a Catholic from a close, conservative family, working as a copygirl on a tabloid that sends reporters out in battered cars to chase sirens and scandal.

In The Field of Blood a toddler is abducted from his garden and found murdered. Two local boys are arrested, and one of them is Paddy’s fiancé’s cousin. Her inside knowledge could make her career, but using it would betray her family and community. When she starts asking questions anyway, the cost is immediate: she becomes an outsider at home, at work and on the streets she’s reporting from.

The Dead Hour moves her onto the night shift, answering police calls in the small hours. At a smart house in a wealthy suburb she sees a bloodied woman and a smug man who quietly stuffs money into official hands—and then into Paddy’s own. When that woman turns up dead, Paddy has to decide whether to admit what happened or investigate alone while others at the paper and in the police rewrite the story.

In Slip of the Knife / The Last Breath Paddy has become a columnist, with a car, a flat and a degree of success she barely trusts. The murder of her former lover, foreign correspondent Terry Patterson, and the dangerous notebooks he leaves to her force her back toward hard reporting, paramilitary secrets and the question of how much truth the public really wants.

Threaded through the books is the changing city itself: heavy industry closing, unemployment rising, and the old certainties of faith and class starting to crack. Mina shows how newsroom culture shapes what crimes are noticed and which lives matter enough for a front page.

Paddy is mouthy, stubborn and often wrong, but her moral compass—however battered—drives the stories.

Read in order, the novels trace both a series of investigations and the slow remaking of Paddy’s life, from invisible copygirl to someone with a public voice and serious enemies.