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FIFTY GRAND provided my first encounter with the work of Adrian McKinty. I trust it won't be my last. His prose is enchanting and the plot of his novel wasn't bad, either, despite the inclusion of various real-life characters, albeit peripheral to the plot, a device that always annoys me. The narrative is in the first person. The narrator is a Cuban detective, Officer Mercado (the reader never learns her given name and I wondered, throughout, what subtle message was thereby being transmitted, although it missed me). As the book opens, she is talking to a man whom she has forced to go into near-freezing water, naked. He insists she has the wrong man and wants to know why this is happening, what has brought her to the portal of murder. She obliges him by beginning her story. She commences with her life just as she enters the USA illegally. She is in a Landrover in the company of a young man five years her junior. His name is Francisco, although he is known as Paco. Two men stop the refugees and, when the passengers prove to have no money, decide to rape Mercado. But the detective establishes her credentials as an extremely tough woman, so that the reader understands, roughly, what to expect of her in the future, and the group proceeds on to Colorado. In a flashback, Mercado explains how her younger brother, Ricky, a journalist, informed her that the father who abandoned them when they were children, has been the victim of a hit run accident. Because he was a Latino, law enforcement could not be bothered doing anything to track down and punish his killer, so Mercado decides, appropriately enough, to take the law into her own hands and execute the malefactor, hence her journey to the US. Mercado gets a job cleaning, through a man who arranges work for illegals. The town where she is working is one frequented by Hollywood movie stars (including Tom Cruise, of whom all the residents stand in awe) and the subsequent action leads up to where the book begins, with Mercado's torment of the killer. For me, the best thing about the book is the prose. Which is not to say that there is anything lacking in the other aspects, although the killer's identity might have been more obscure. The characterisation is very strongly depicted. Even Raul Castro makes a brief appearance, but I could only wonder whether the dictator's brother was accurately painted. For all that the killer was easily determined, the book really grabbed my attention and I was unwilling to put it down, even for the time it took me to walk over to my favourite coffee lounge, so I could resume reading. That should certainly give some idea of how absorbing I found this novel.
Reviewed by Denise Pickles, August 2009
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