Fifty Grand
Non-series
Adrian
McKinty
Henry Holt (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 0-8050-8900-4 (0805089004)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8900-4 (9780805089004)
Publication Date: April 2009
List Price: $25.00
Synopsis (from
the publisher): A man is killed in a hit-and-run on a frozen mountain
road in the town of Fairview, Colorado. He is an illegal immigrant in a
rich Hollywood resort community not unlike Telluride. No one is
prosecuted for his death and his case is quietly forgotten.
Six months later another illegal makes a treacherous run across the
border. Barely escaping with her life and sanity intact, she finds work
as a maid with one of the employment agencies in Fairview. Secretly,
she begins to investigate the shadowy collision that left her father
dead.
The maid isn’t a maid. And she’s not Mexican, either.
She’s Detective Mercado, a police officer from Havana, and
she’s looking for answers: Who killed her father? Was it one of
the smooth- talking Hollywood types? Was it a minion of the terrifying
county sheriff? And why was her father, a celebrated defector to the
United States, hiding in Colorado as the town ratcatcher?
Review: Adrian
McKinty's meticulously plotted novel Fifty
Grand is exceptionally well written and such a joy to read that
it is ever so slightly disappointing that the author chose to populate
it with stereotypical characters and end it on such a weak note.
Cuban police officer "Maria" Mercado's father, a defector and traitor
to the Revolution, has been killed by a hit-and-run driver in Colorado.
Not satisfied with the official investigation, she decides to risk her
own life, and that of her brother and mother who remain in Havana, to
illegally travel to the US to determine the true circumstances of his
death and, if possible, to avenge it. Receiving permission from Cuban
authorities to travel to Mexico, she assumes there a false identity and
crosses the border as an illegal alien, one of many Mexicans looking
for work in the US. Though she ultimately discovers who killed her
father, there are many questions that remain unanswered. And she
realizes too late that the answers are, in fact, back in Havana.
Fifty Grand opens with
Maria imprisoning, in an ice-filled lake of all places, the person she
believes responsible for her father's death. And when he cries out,
"How d-did it c-come to this?", she answers, "We've got time. I'll tell
you." The narrative then goes back in time and relates how she came to
be in Colorado and why she's watching a man slowly freeze to death in a
lake. It is, admittedly, very slow going at times, especially in the
early chapters. Still, it's strongly written, often punctuated with
short, descriptive, bulleted sentences. "A bus stop. Mountains to the
west and east. A spear of cloud in a cobalt sky. The road a straight
line running through woods on either side of a broad valley. The
outskirts of Fairview to the south, nothing but forest to the north.
Forest all the way to Canada. The sound of a chain saw." Maria is able
to quickly adapt to her new surroundings and go about the task at hand,
"[t]he dull clothes better than camouflage, just another Mex going
about her silent business, just another invisible with no plans or
dreams or thoughts in her head."
Though the characters are, for the most part, fully and richly drawn,
the author isn't above resorting to racial profiling. White Americans
are typically depicted as rich, corrupt, ignorant or lazy; sometimes
all of the above, often worse. Latinos, on the other hand, are honest,
hard-working and exploited. Two icons of American culture, Hollywood
and Starbucks, are also specifically and repeatedly targeted as
examples of "yuma" excess. There are even less than subtle political
overtones, that in spite of the desperate poverty and inefficiency of
Communist Cuba, its manner of governing is superior to that of its
richer, far more powerful neighbor, the United States. None of this is
really relevant to the plot, thus its unnecessary inclusion in the book
made all the more obvious.
Despite these relatively minor annoyances, the brilliance of the
writing in Fifty Grand and
the intricate plot are sufficient to recommend it. But as carefully
crafted as most of the book is, the conclusion comes off as pedestrian,
predictable to be sure, a quick and clean, albeit uninspired, way of
ending what is otherwise an exceptional novel.
Special thanks to Henry Holt for providing an ARC of Fifty Grand for this review.
Review Copyright © 2009 — Hidden Staircase Mystery Books — All Rights Reserved
Have you read Fifty Grand? How would you rate it?
Thrillers by this author ...
Hidden
River
Scribner (Hardcover), December 2004
ISBN-10: 0-7432-4700-0 (0743247000)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7432-4700-9 (9780743247009)
Fifty Grand
Henry Holt (Hardcover), April 2009
ISBN-10: 0-8050-8900-4 (0805089004)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8050-8900-4 (9780805089004)
Omnimystery keywords for Fifty Grand ...
Location(s) referenced: Havana, Cuba, Denver,
Colorado.
