Fifty Grand

A Novel of Suspense

By: Adrian McKinty

Narrated by: Paula Christensen

Length: 13 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

An illegal immigrant is killed in a hit-and-run on a frozen mountain road in the town of Fairview, Colorado. No one is prosecuted for his death and his case is quietly forgotten. Six months later another illegal makes a treacherous run across the border, barely escaping with her life. She finds work as a maid and, secretly, begins to investigate the death of her father. But she isn't a maid, and she's not Mexican. She's Detective Mercado, a police officer from Havana, and she's looking for answers to her father's death. McKinty's live-wire prose is riveting, right up to a final, shocking conclusion.

©2009 Barron's Educational Series, Inc. (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"This amazing novel....has riveting mystery, politics of just about every shade, and thrills on almost every page. . . .This is going to be the BIG BOOK of 2009." - (Ken Bruen, author of The Guards and Once Were Cops)

What a bore!

Billed as novel of suspense. What a joke. No suspense. No interest. Boring. Tedious. Nothing happens. Tired of 2 and 3 word sentences.

A is for awful

I loved other mckinty books yet can’t suspend the gag reflex sufficiently to get past chapter 4 even at 1.5 speed. So. Bad.

Audible recommended this?

This was really disappointing. Frequently, books that Audible recommends (e.g., The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) are good. This was not.

The plot was hard to believe. I won't give spoilers, but the time frames are all wrong. At times, the novel is pointlessly violent. I don't mind violence, but in this novel, it felt like it was added on as a dramatic device.

The narration was overdone. The reader tried too hard to do too many distinct voices. Most of the the male voices are grating. The Latin accent of the narrator was very forced. The reader has a nice speaking voice (when she reads the title at the start of each part), but I don't like this much drama in a reading.

I've downloaded two clinkers in a row from Audible. I might just listen to music for a while.

Slow and choppy

The reader did a good job. But how can you read one-word sentences, time after time after time? It's too long and the flashbacks seem to be there to fill time. The novel is one heck of an indictment of the "yubas", white people. According to the white man who wrote this book, it seems like only rotten white people live in the States.

Predictable and Implausible.

I could not begin to understand what motivated the protagonist, and the timeline seemed absurdly implausible. This was the worst book I've listened to in ages.

Interesting Story Line Ruined By Foul Language

The author had the structural framework for a fantastic piece of work here. A great plot with twists that kept you guessing and reguessing. Yes there were unrealistic moments, but they were forgivable within the plot.

At first the flash backs and the one word reflections were difficult and confusing, but with patients, they were overcome-able. The tragedy is that the author took a really clever plot and pretty much destroyed it with the lazy author's downfall - using vulgar language instead of ingenuity to build and express excitement and tension.

There are long passages where ever sentence contains the F-word. I am not a prude, and don't begrudge an author an occasional expletive in the heat of the moment. In fact there is a time and a place for that. But when the story's F-word count rises into the hundreds, that is inexcusable, infantile and pure laziness on the author's point; a sign that the author is either too lazy, or is incapable of portraying the scenes he/she needs to with prose, and thus reverts to cheap vulgarity, using a single four letter word as a noun, verb, adjective, adverb, admonition, admiration, and whatever else they can't handle!

A great plot; a lazy, unfortunate execution.

marginal

Not a bad story but the authors style is challenging.

Awful language

Take out the F word and there wouldn't be any dialogue. Story drags on and on.

pcdummy

bad story

Way too many digressions

Having enjoyed The Dead Yard by McKinty I thought I'd enjoy this, his latest book. This one was so much slower and had waaay too many digressions that were plain boring. Disappointed - good when the action is happening, but all the description was way too much for my 90 minute commute. Narrator was okay but, overall too much fluff to hold me engrossed. Certanly didn't stay in the car to listen to this one as I did with Dead Yard.