Brannigan's investigation into Moira's disappearance is detailed, and gripping, but never stretches the reader's credibility. This sort of investigation is not in Kate's normal line of business but, as a special favour to Jett she agrees.McDermid's great quality is her ability to construct plausible and convincing plots, and this is evident here. After leaving Jett, Moira had fallen on very hard times, and subsided into a life fuelled by drug abuse and financed by occasional prostitution.
They had parted several years ago and Jett was conscious that his career had been declining ever since. At the after-concert part Jett commissions Kate to find Moira, his former partner (both musical and romantic). She finds herself accompanying Richard, her music journalist boyfriend, to a gig by Jett, a local boy who had made good after having grown up in straitened circumstances in Mossside. Then, in 1992 in 'Dead Beat', McDermid introduced her feisty, Manchester-based private investigator, Kate Brannigan.As the novel opens, Kate is in drawing towards the conclusion of an investigation into traders in counterfeit goods (raging from high end watches to designer leisurewear). Her first three novels revolved around Lindsay Gordon, lesbian journalist who solved fairly traditional whodunit style mysteries. By the time she published the first of those novels, however, she had already written two separate series, each featuring engaging female protagonists. Val McDermid is probably best known for her gritty, gory novels featuring Detective Inspector Carol Jordan and psychiatrist Dr Tony Hill, televised as 'Wire in the Blood' (taking the name of the second novel in the series). And it's not obvious until quite late in the book who the murderer is going to be. The story is a bit silly, but it just-about works (taking into account a fair amount of self-parody), and tough-talking Brannigan and her cynical throwaway comments about the world she moves in are fun.
And not just any old murder, but a murder in a mansion containing a finite number of suspects. And, without too much obvious grinding of the cogs of narrative inevitability, she finds herself face to face with her first corpse and investigating a murder. In this opener, she is persuaded against her better judgment to take time off from a counterfeit wristwatch investigation to undertake a missing-person enquiry for a rock-star client (yes, they still had those in Manchester in 1992 too.). She does the legwork whilst her business partner Bill Mortensen does the clever stuff with floppy disks and modems (yes, 1992 was a long time ago!). Dead Beat introduces Kate Brannigan, a partner in a Manchester security consultancy that does investigation work mostly in commercial and computer fraud cases.
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