The Dead Hour

Paddy Meehan thought she'd be farther along in her career as an investigative journalist by now. But three years after breaking a big story, she's still on perpetual night shift, chasing police calls for a story that will promote her out of a twilight existence that makes candy bars and coffee a medical necessity. With her father and brothers unemployed and her 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 elegant blonde in the shadows bleeding from a head injury doesn't want any help; and the well-dressed, ingratiating man at the front door tells Paddy everything's fine and that she should leave. And then he asks her to make sure nothing appears in the paper, slipping cash into her hand before he closes the door. The next morning, Paddy sees the lead TV news story: the blonde woman had been tortured, beaten, and left to die. The untraceable man was neither her boyfriend nor her husband, and Paddy can't understand why the victim passed up the chance to walk through the door and live. Far from the spoiled trophy wife Paddy assumed her to be, the victim was a prosecution lawyer with a social conscience that clashed with her privileged background. Soon Paddy begins to make connections no one else has seen, and after she witnesses the body of a suicide being pulled from the river, she finds surprising links between the two deaths. It's the story Paddy's dreamed of, but she'll lose all credibility if word gets out about the bribe. The police who attended the call are twisting the evidence for reasons of their own, and her boss at the newspaper is impatient with Paddy's unproven hunches. Only Paddy cares enough to pursue a dark and brutal truth that could make her career - or kill her.