Customer Reviews

Fifty Grand

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Taking its title from a Hemingway short story, Adrian McKinty's FIFTY GRAND opens in Cuba before moving on, via Mexico, to Colorado, as a Cuban cop, Hernandez, goes illegally undercover in the US to investigate her father's death. The Hemingway homage is a brave one, inviting ridicule and accusations of hubris, but McKinty has long been purveying a blend of muscular lyricism in which collide the brutalities of the crime novel and a knowing, self-effacing literary style.

His sixth novel for adults (he also writes the `Lighthouse' series for children), FIFTY GRAND offers a challenging conceit, which is to put the tough, spare rhythms associated with classic hard-boiled novels (think Hemingway himself, James Ellroy, James Cain) into the mind of a first-person female protagonist. The result is an incendiary, adrenalin-fuelled thriller, but one that also functions as a blackly hilarious social satire of the skewed values of pre-Obama America, as Hernandez, in the role of exploited illegal immigrant, infiltrates the glitzy world of Colorado's ski-resort set, cleaning up the mess left behind by Hollywood`s jet-set.

Most successful of all, however, is McKinty's ability to slip inside Hernandez's skin. The undercover Hernandez is thrown back on her own resources as she investigates her father's death and brings those responsible to a very particular kind of justice, without recourse to conventional resources. As vulnerable as she is tough, as scared as she is determined, as fragile as she is lethal, she makes for a highly unusual, creepily authentic and utterly compelling anti-heroine.

I'd been a fan of McKinty's work since I first read DEAD I WELL MAY BE (2003). His "Dead Trilogy," starring anti-hero Michael Forsythe was, in my view, the best character-driven series of the decade. So I was a bit disappointed to learn that his latest would be a standalone. I'm happy to report that my concerns were completely unfounded. This book is his best to date.

I won't rehash the plot here (you can read about it above), but I will say that this book has some of the most developed, believable, and identifiable characters that you'll see in this genre. Mercado is one of the most well drawn female protagonists I've encountered, period. The ancillary characters (in particular Mercado's boss and her young travel companion) are perfectly rendered and add to the storyline, rather than distract from it. In a book of this sort, the characters are typically the key - here, they're pitch perfect.

The other notable character in this book is Cuba itself. Mercado's Cuban heritage, and her ties to her homeland (and its attendant paranoia, poverty, and crime) colors everything in the story and lends itself both to her actions and her thoughts throughout her journey. The flashbacks peppered throughout the book (which take place in Cuba prior to Mercado's departure for the US) provide contrast between the Cuban mentality and geography and that of the US. It's clear that McKinty spent significant time in Cuba while writing FIFTY GRAND - the Cuban backdrop is just that well done.

In all, this should be the book that propels McKinty beyond his current core fanbase and takes him mainstream. Fans of his prior books will love it, and for those new to McKinty, it provides a perfect place to start. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

Like the book, I'll keep this short and sweet.

"Fifty Grand" is an excellent novel. Well paced, and meticulously detailed, it grabbed me from the opening chapter. McKinty presents us with a well rounded, deeply emotional protagonist, and a series of equally fleshed out villains that create a unique twist on the age-old revenge tale.

Without giving too much away McKinty manages to paint the picture of a life through memories in vivid fashion without ever detracting from the main plot. In fact, the use of flashbacks and flashforwards is a trait which would be a gimmick for most other authors, but it always seems to work with McKinty.

Highly recommended if you like your thrillers with a dash of the literary or you know, enjoy character development.

It remains something of a mystery to me why McKinty isn't better known here. True, he hails from Northern Ireland, but all the books I've read of his have big American themes, particularly about having outsider status in the world's most powerful country. He worked it from the Irish angle in his stunning Michael Forsythe trilogy, and now he comes at it again from a country with more troubled relations to our own--Cuba. This book should be hitting with a bang right now as everyone who reads the newspapers re-evaluates our relation to Cuba, but in fact the mainstream media seems not to have picked up on its up to the minute relevance.

Others have gone into the plot structure. I am impressed with the pared down prose, which is perfect for a novel of vengeance, with its single-minded, knifepoint focus. Knowing from his other books that McKinty writes it this way by choice rather than necessity, I found that the more deadpan tone made it all the more breathtaking in the climactic moments when his natural gift for lyricism is finally allowed to break through.

I am probably making this more talky than it needs to be, though. You don't have to care one whit about the rich and the poor, the powerful and the invisible to enjoy this book. Pick it up and start right in. You are in for a thrilling ride.

Reading possesses its own peculiar joys. There are titles that put a hook in your nose and drag you from flyleaf to afterword in a single sitting. Others feature characters so well-realized you half expect to bump into them at the grocery store. And some build settings with such verisimilitude that the very air in the room seems to change when you crack the cover. But there's one joy that's particularly rare and fine -- the joy of watching an author excel. That's the delight you'll find in Adrian McKinty's Fifty Grand.

Cuban detective Mercado is used to busting child murderers, trying to stay of the right side of interdepartmental politics and snapping up household essentials on the black market. But six months ago, a hit-and-run driver in Fairview, Colorado, killed her father, throwing him down an embankment and leaving him to drown in his own blood from a rib-punctured lung. Since Cuba viewed her old man as a traitor for escaping the island, and America thought him an illegal immigrant because he went under an alias, his death gets ignored by both nations. Not by Mercado, though. She's about to try something completely out of her league -- fly to the mainland on a seven-day visa under the pretense of investigating a criminology program in Mexico and then skip over the border into the U.S. to find her father's killer. A desperate plan, but not even she knows that the shadow economy in which she'll soon find herself is as grim as Castro's gulags.

In his first thriller, Dead I Well May Be, McKinty's favored narrative mode was stream-of-consciousness. It was rich, but overgrown and difficult. Fifty Grand finds him pruning away the excess, and the novel is better for it. Plain first-person point of view takes center stage most of the time, only surrendering to the old twisty style during moments of introspection or violence. And what violence it is. Some authors treat gunplay and fisticuffs as fun interludes, making human suffering into a light thing meant for enjoyment. Not McKinty, who treats them as they are -- awful. His confrontations come sharp and painful as a knife to the gut, and Mercado's final battle is so visceral it feels downright apocalyptic. The only place where the book stumbles is edging a bit too close to moral equivalence in comparing the United States' wrongs with those of Cuba. Yet even here, McKinty remains deft enough to remind those of us who love God, guns and apple pie of an ancient truth: The human heart is desperately wicked no matter the country in which it resides.

There is only one bad thing about discovering a wonderful, new (to me) author, and that is that I've got to find the time to read everything else he or she has written. Fifty Grand was my first Adrian McKinty novel, but it won't be the last. I'd heard plenty of praise for Fifty Grand, so expected it to be OK. It's more than OK!

Set in both Cuba and in Colorado and Wyoming, the story is about Cuban police detective Mercado, who sneaks into the US as an illegal immigrant, in order to find out the truth behind the death of her father in Colorado, six months earlier.

There's plenty of violence here, but above all, it's about Detective Mercado finding not just her father's killer, but finding herself. The reader gets interesting insight into the lives of the rich and famous in a ski resort in Colorado, as well as the drab ordinary life Mercado has temporarily left behind in Havana. And reading about what it's like for the illegal Latino workers in the US is a real eye opener.

Adrian McKinty is good at coming up with interesting characters, whether we like them or not. I particularly liked the man who sells weapons, and the pesky youth from Nicaragua. And I wouldn't mind knowing how he researched the shoving of dead people around on thin ice.

It's a cliché, but this was a hard book to put down. Read it! You won't be disappointed.

After three opening chapters that crackle with excitement, "Fifty Grand" hit a relatively flat middle sequence and then ramped back up toward a taut, exciting and gruesome finish.

McKinty's style is enticing. It's brisk and breaks all sorts of so-called rules, which is fine to my taste. McKinty is prone to list a series of sights and sounds over the standard prose. Highly recommended for the style alone, akin to Ken Bruen's clipped, abbreviated and spare approach. If you are looking for elegant prose and intricate sentence structures that beg for a diagram, seek elsewhere.

After the first three chapters--each one as good as the last, each one stepping back in time from the one before it--you wonder how McKinty will keep it going. When the action hits fictional Fairview, Colorado, the story loses some of its energy and edge. The detective work feels linear and random. A Cuban defector posing as a Mexican immigrant, Detective Mercado works undercover as a maid--a convenient situation that allows her access to just the right people in her quest to find out how her father lost his life. Information seems to come at her just a bit too easily.

I know McKinty lived in Colorado (where I live) for a long time but Fairview felt like such an amalgam of real locations--Telluride, Steamboat Springs, Aspen--that it didn't quite ring true. The extremely corrupt cops were also just a bit too one-note, too far gone.

In the end, a good, solid thriller with some terrific scenes and a memorable style.

Five stars for style.

Three stars for plot.

Two stars for characters (due solely to some over-the-top bad guys).

Four stars, in the end, because you keep reading for that nifty style.

When the venerable Ken Bruen declares a novel "the big book of 2009", it gets my attention. Not that Adrian McKinty, author of the explosive "Dead" trilogy starting with the brutally fascinating "Dead I Well May Be", needs further introduction or additional accolades. But McKinty struts a depth of sophistication and intelligence here only hinted in previous works - subtlety and insight placing him in the rarefied air of Martin Cruz Smith, Don Winslow, and yes, Ken Bruen. This is a pop thriller tour de force not content with merely nail-biting suspense and mystery that will keep you riveted even knowing there are other things you should be doing. From Montana's tundra, where a bound and naked young man is led across a frozen lake by his masked assailant, to a burned-out stretch of barren dessert borderland where a coyote ferries a band of illegal immigrants, to Havana's decaying malecon, McKinty chronicles a Cormac McCarthy-like week-long odyssey of young Cuban police detective Mercado as she tries to uncover the mystery of her estranged father's hit-and-run death in rural Colorado.

In a scant 300 pages, McKinty manages to cover an impressive range of weighty topics - oppression under Cuban's tyrannical Castro regime, human trafficking, Hollywood's plastic culture - wrapped around a tight and focused tale of revenge and redemption. Without losing sight of his final and unexpected gut punch of a finish, McKinty manages, without lecturing, to strip away any remaining liberal myths of a Cuban Communist paradise while skewering the excesses of Hollywood's decadent culture and those reveling in the slime. Despite the grim, gritty, and violent subject matter, McKinty's staccato prose is poetic but never distracting, knowing, like Bruen, that the best writers can create the most vivid imagery with haiku-like minimalism.

One of those rare books that you'll wish wouldn't end, while rushing to end to see the final unraveling, this is indeed the "big book of 2009." An illuminating, intelligent, and fast-paced thriller that will have me hoping for another McKinty trilogy - this time spun around Havana's gritty detective Mercado. Don't let this one pass - and if you haven't discovered Adrian McKinty yet, here is a great place to start.

With Fifty Grand, McKinty has completely departed from Irish anti-heros on a blood-trickled quest for revenge, to Cuban women on an ice-glazed mission to find well, revenge. And more than that. Or less than that. The same vivid McKinty desciptions, the same flee-flowing streams of consciousness, the same taut, blood and guts altercations. But brought forth in a different manner altogether. Departures and new beginnings. I love McKinty's work for what it always was, as the earlier stuff even lit my path on the way to writing crime fiction. But I thank him for bringing something new and refreshing to the plate with Fifty Grand, a poignant title with a poignant message from start to finish.

Cuban detective Mercado is young woman skilled at her job, pulling in perps hook line and sinker in a business suit and then casually conversing with her always reliable brother, Ricky. All in a day's work, right? Until the conversation reveals answers to what Mercado feels compelled to do. Yes, compelled and overwhelmed with conflicting emotions, each battling for precedence to propell her diligently followed road less travelled from Mexico to Colorado, Mercado poses as a Mexican illegal in search of humble housekeeping gig in Hollywood-ridden Fairview with a chance for new life in the US. But, this is all a cover-up act so that she can follow her brother's leads and find out exactly who killed her Cuban defecter father. What's she's going to do the heartless killer, well, who knows? Not even Mercado. Not even Maria, one in the same.

Mercado/Maria must sift through the minor and major characters who occupy her path to righteousness; the Hollywood elite and not so Hollywood elite, the crooked ex-soldier sheriff with a toughest kid on the block complex, and a hot/cold relationship with her fellow refugee/confidant, Paco, who's already bore witness to what she can accomplish when she's the animal trapped in the bullet-laced corner. If she's found out by Sheriff Briggs, she'll be a popsicle in the desolate frozen lakes of Wyoming. If she's found out by the Cuban government, well, let's just say that Che Guevera got off easy. Mercado must rely on her skills as an undercover officer and her sheer burning will to find out the truth in order to survive the foreign mountain terrain of Fairview, Colorado.

Some may see subtle similarities to McKinty's third effort, Hidden River, but you will find yourself pleasantly surprised, finding the book's, as my mother calls it, the "Ah-ha" before it's all said and done. McKinty's most heart-felt, emotion novel to date, as he nearly succeeded in making a grown man shed an itzy bitzy tear. Nearly. Do yourself a favor and tell yourself bump the economy, I want a good read and I want it now. Then invest in Fifty Grand. Por favor.

On an icy isolated Colorado mountain road, an illegal immigrant is killed in a hit and run. Law enforcement gives the case nothing as the victim has no rights and was just a rodent catcher; besides which someone in the affluent town of Fairview probably killed the man who should never have been there in the first place, and no cop is going after the wealthy.

Six months later the case is tundra cold when a woman makes the dangerous trek across the border. She barely survives, but manages to reach Fairview where she obtains work as a maid. The woman is an illegal immigrant but not from Mexico and is not looking for work in the States. Though an extremely dangerous trek to get to her destination, Havana Police Detective Mercado snuck out of Cuba and through Mexico into the States obsessed with finding out who killed her father; an intellectual exile whom she had not seen in fourteen years, in a hit and run near Fairview six months ago in which the driver left him to die.

This is an exhilarating thriller from the onset when the illegal rat catcher is allowed to die and six months later when an undercover investigation by another illegal turns into a cat and mouse encounter. The story line is fast-paced with a neat final twist as Adrian McKinty provides readers with an entertaining tale driven by a strong cast especially the avenging Cuban.

Harriet Klausner