Review: FIFTY GRAND, Adrian McKinty

Serpent's Tail, 2009, ISBN, 978-1-846668-723-5, 308 pages

When Mercado was 13, her father walked out of her life. He committed treason, hijacked a ferry, and escaped to Mexico. He never came back, never wrote, and left Mercado, her brother Ricky, and their mother to fend for themselves as best they could, which wasn't well. Mercado becomes a cop in Cuba. And then 14 years on her brother is told their father has been killed in Colorado, the victim of a hit and run. Mercado's brother Ricky is allowed to go to Colorado to make the funeral arrangements, and comes back convinced there was something strange about their father's death. That idea eats at Mercado until she decides she has to go to Colorado herself.

Set in a world of drug smuggling and illegal immigration into the USA, in a Colorado ski resort where the local sheriff turns a blind eye, and takes his cut, FIFTY GRAND almost lost me in the second chapter with incredibly graphic violence. The fact that the third chapter is in a different time frame, and much calmer, kept me reading. By its end I knew what Ricky had found out, and what Mercado intended to do.

I once had a book where the chapters were un-numbered, each one packaged. The reader was invited to read the chapters in any order of their choice. That's not quite what McKinty has done here. What he seems to have done is taken one of the last chapters and dealt it first, and then a middle chapter and dealt it second (that's the gruesome one). By the time you've read them, and then the more sedate chapter 3, you'll be hooked. You'll want to know why those first two chapters happened. This is a very powerful book, with a twist in the tail (or is it tale?) that I bet you don't see coming.

My rating: 4.6

Adrian McKinty was born and grew up in Carrickfergus, Northern Ireland at the height of the Troubles. He studied politics at Oxford University and after a failed legal career he moved to the US in the early 1990s. He found work as a security guard, postman, construction worker, barman, rugby coach and bookstore clerk before becoming a school teacher in Denver. You get the feeling in FIFTY GRAND that he knows Colorado well. In 2008 he moved to St. Kilda, Melbourne, Australia with his wife and kids. He now describes himself as an Irish novelist currently living in Oz. You can learn a lot more about McKinty on his blog: the psychopathology of everyday life.

His books for adults:
Michael Forsythe series
1. Dead I Well May Be (2003)
2. The Dead Yard (2006)
3. The Bloomsday Dead (2007)

Novels
Orange Rhymes With Everything (1997)
Hidden River (2005)
Fifty Grand (2009)

Other reviews:

• In the Guardian by John O'Connell
• by Declan Burke
• by Gerard Brennan
• by Corey Wilde
• an interview on Aust Crime