Fifty Grand

Cuban cop Mercado has a score to settle, on behalf of a deadbeat dad, a 'traitor' who skipped free from Castro's control to set up a new life working illegally in Colorado. He settled in a ski resort popular with the Hollywood set, where the facade is maintained by the immigrant cleaners and labourers who work for below minimum wage while the local sheriff is bribed to turn a blind eye. Hernandez Sr's dreams of fortune and freedom came to a swift end when he was killed in a hit-and-run accident.Sworn to avenge his death, Mercado has some obstacles to overcome - not least getting out of Cuba, where visas are as elusive as constant electricity. Switching back and forth between heat-soaked Havana and the icy luxury of the mountainside resort, Fifty Grand is an audacious thriller from an acknowledged talent - and an incendiary debut for a new hero.

From Publishers WeeklyIrish crime writer McKinty (The Bloomsday Dead) delivers an intelligent novel of suspense about cultural identity. After a hit-and-run driver kills Alberto Suarez, a Cuban defector who's been working as a rodent exterminator in Fairview, Colo., his daughter, Mercado, a talented young Havana cop, feels duty bound to avenge his death. She obtains a visa to Mexico City under a false pretext and later slips across the U.S. border to get to Fairview, which has become the happening place for the Hollywood cognoscenti. Since someone has to clean up after the wild parties, drugs and general debauchery that keep the town's underground economy bustling, Mercado joins the silent community of illegal workers living on Wetback Mountain. As she investigates her father's death, she discovers that his secrets, like those of Fairview itself, were far more extensive than she could have realized. In trademark fashion, McKinty winds up his provocative tale with a violent and memorable final act. (May) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From BooklistChanging direction from his celebrated Forsythe trilogy, starring an Irish immigrant who runs afoul of the New York Mob, McKinty offers a hard-edged noir about a female police detective from Cuba who travels illegally to Fairview, Colorado, hoping to make sense of her father’s death in an apparent hit-and-run on a frozen mountain road. Beginning with a gripping set piece in which Detective Mercado, disguised as a man, smuggles herself across the Mexican border and into the U.S., the novel jumps between Mercado’s under-the-radar investigation (Why was her father, a celebrated Cuban defector, posing as a Mexican immigrant?) and flashbacks to her own life in Cuba before Dad abandoned the family. Posing as an illegal maid from Mexico, Mercado infiltrates a group of supercilious Hollywood types who may hold the answers, all the while constructing a macabre revenge plan. McKinty tightens the screws on his heroine effectively, forcing her into a classic noir conundrum from which there appears to be no escape. An impeccably constructed thriller supported by a cast of finely rounded, Elmore Leonard–like characters. --Bill Ott