Mysterious Reviews, mysteries reviewed by the Hidden Staircase Mystery Books, is publishing a new review of Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty. For our blog readers, we are printing it first here in advance of its publication on our website.
Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty
Non-series
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
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
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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?
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