A young Cuban cop seeks revenge in a cold climate. When bright, ambitious, hot-headed Mercado learns of her father's death in far-off Colorado, she reacts by sneaking out of Cuba, bound for Yankee-land. People who do that without Fidel's blessing risk unpleasant consequences, but the newly minted detective doesn't hesitate. Her father's end had been brutal. Hit by a car on an icy mountain road, he was left broken and bleeding by a driver who fled the scene, and whose identity Mercado feels has not been sufficiently investigated. It's true she hasn't seen or heard from her father since he defected from Cuba 14 years ago, but she has too much iron in her make-up to be deterred by their long separation. To her, "revenge isn't just a right, it's a sacred obligation." Once she's arrived in the resort town of Fairview, posing as a domestic, she launches her own investigation among a cornucopia of suspects, including a bully of a sheriff and a clutch of B-list movie actors, complete with entourages, placed on her father's enemies list for reasons hard to fathom. But that's the thing about her enigmatic father, Mercado soon discovers. Everything about him is as mysterious as the question of what he was doing in Fairview. Why was a one-time intellectual serving as the town's rat-catcher? Despite some plotting deficiencies, the talented McKinty (The Bloomsday Dead, 2007, etc.) does his usual first-rate job of making you like the characters he likes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Irish crime writer McKinty (The Blooms-day 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) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Changing 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.--Ott, Bill Copyright 2009 Booklist