Fifty Grand by Adrian McKinty – review

An illegal immigrant is killed in a hit-and-run in Fairview, Colorado, a ski town for Hollywood types too cool for Vail. Nobody gives a shit – what’s a dead Mexican when there’s another van-load no doubt on the way? Thing is, despite what his papers may say, the dead man wasn’t Mexican but Cuban, and somebody does care who murdered him, namely his estranged daughter, Detective Mercado of the Havana police.

Using a cover story about interviewing for grad school in Mexico City, Mercado has one week to steal into the US, make her way to Colorado, pose as a harmless illegal cleaning lady in Fairview, find her father’s killer, and get bloody revenge. If she doesn’t get back to Havana in a week, she’ll be labeled a defector, and her family and friends will be imprisoned or worse by the Cuban government. It’s a large task, but it doesn’t take long to recognize that if anybody’s got the sand for it, it’s Mercado.

I wasn’t impressed with McKinty’s debut, Dead I Well May Be. I found it to be a strong story weighed down by a voice too in love with itself to bother with tension and plain old narrative drive. Naturally, I couldn’t be bothered with the rest of the Dead trilogy or McKinty’s standalone, Hidden River. Then my BSC colleague Brian Lindenmuth went ahead and said something about Fifty Grand (“This book, along with Safer by Sean Doolittle, represents what commercial, popular fiction SHOULD be”) on his Top 50 Favorite Novels of the Decade piece. Intriguing enough, so here we fucking are, eh?

I’m happy to say that Mr. Lindenmuth knows his shit and that indeed, this is what everyone with even a passing interest in crime fiction should be reading. Fifty Grand is smart, violent, funny, intense, and just challenging enough to make discerning basement crazies and adventurous thriller fans of every stripe reason to put down their weapons and embrace, maybe even grope each other a little, make it weird.

There’s a lot of great Cuban and Hollywood lore in Fifty Grand, only unlike DIWMB, it didn’t feel like the author was trying to let me know how learned he was on his subject; it didn’t slow down the novel’s pace. Also, the prose this time out is clipped and assured, the dialogue consistently sharp and seemingly authentic.

And yes, it is indeed a mystery novel, there’s no getting around that, but the revelations are low-key, the plot developments organic. Shit gets violent (and gloriously so!), and people die, but the mystery isn’t out-of-control complex or unbelievable. This shit by and large feels plausible, the whodunit aspects toned down to a degree that won’t make you roll your eyes or the divert the story away from its focus – Cuba, Hollywood, and revenge.

Also, speaking of Hollywood, this may be the smartest crime novel about the movie business I’ve read in years. The Hollywood shit is sharp, effortless, and slyly satirical. And in case I haven’t made myself clear about the violence in this novel, allow me to set your ass straight: dude has command over action sequences that we rarely see outside of a Huston novel these days. There’s a sequence at the beginning of the novel that is so fucked and gross it may scare off middle-of-the-road thriller readers, but will thrill those with an unhealthy relationship with their inner drooling savage like the Nerd.

So I’ve finally gotten on board with Adrian McKinty, and if you’ve kept him low on your TBR pile for a while, you should rearrange that fucker toot-fucking-sweet. I mean, what else were you gonna do today? Vacuum?