BOOK OF THE DAY: Fifty GrandBy Adrian McKinty, Serpent's Tail, 308pp; £10.99
SERIOUS CRIME fiction these days is a fickle gamble, especially for newer writers. Genre boundaries have become blurred. Crime thriller enthusiasts are perhaps among the hardest readers to impress because of their love for both the list of illustrious luminaries and equally because of the powerful abilities of this same elite to bring their main characters to life. It’s called character stamina.
Cop tales are not really my cup of tea, and even though I've enjoyed Jeffrey Deaver and David Baldacci, the same can't be said for Adrian McKinty's Fifty Grand.
His protagonist is a tough-talking Cuban female detective, Mercado, who resorts to extreme violence when she’s not getting what she wants, which is pretty much all the time. She fools her boss into thinking she is holidaying in Mexico for a week when her destination is Colorado where her father was recently killed in a hit and run. Having entered the US illegally she sets about tracking down his killers after his death had been covered-up with a pay-off to the local sheriff. While in Colorado, she assumes the persona of an illegal Mexican housemaid so she can gain access to the houses of some of the Hollywood stars who have made the famous ski resort their home. While crossing the US border she befriends Paco, a genuine Mexican immigrant. Together they eliminate suspects, often using the most hideously violent methods, leaving their victims within an inch of their lives.
It’s not until Mercado returns home that she finds out the crucial piece of truth about her father’s other life that completes the jigsaw, along with why he came to be in the US, having abandoned his family in Cuba.
I’ve never been to the ski resorts of Colorado, but if McKinty’s descriptions are accurate, then it’s a very different place to the picture postcard setting I’ve read about. With its perfect facade maintained by the hard labour of impoverished illegal immigrants, the resort sounds depressingly squalid.
Some of Hollywood’s hottest names pop up in the storyline, including Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Matthew Broderick. Seeing their names made me increasingly uncomfortable as to how they might feel about being associated with the image of the resort’s labour conditions, bent sheriff and sleazy drug dealers. Their presence made a weak plot weaker.
Sadly, but not surprisingly, there's a rapidly growing audience that craves gratuitous violence of the most depraved kind, and McKinty doesn't disappoint his growing legion of hardcore fans. As a writer I respect the power of the reader's imagination to lead the way deeper into the heart of the story. Violence, like sex, is often an expectation if you're going to make a good story believable, as is the need for sub-plots – but sparingly, please. Violence is part of the smaller picture and it can't be allowed overshadow the progress of the plot. In Fifty Grand, this is precisely what happens.
Mercado could have been a very sexy woman; but instead, she became a female parody of your typical bent male cop. Women are not generally as violent as the story portrays her. I rarely liked her for anything, apart from her relationship with Paco. Mercado is the main character, upon whose shoulders the story’s credibility stands or falls. In her case, it collapsed in a heap from very early on.
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