This is the latest book from Irish (now living in Australia) writer Adrian McKinty. Not one of Michael Forsythe "The Dead" trilogy, this book comes from a considerably different angle.
From the Blurb:
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 a facade of legality is maintained by the immigrant cleaners and labourers working for below minimum wage - while the local sheriff is bribed to turn a blind eye.
Opening Lines:
The frozen lake and the black vacuum sky and the dead man pleading for the return of his remaining days. "There must be some kind of mistake."
This knockout punch of a thriller from a critically acclaimed author follows a young Cuban detective’s quest for vengeance against her father’s killer in a Colorado mountain town
A man is killed in a hit-and-run on a frozen mountain road in the town of Fairview, Colorado. He is an illegal immigrant in a rich Hollywood resort community not unlike Telluride. 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 and sanity intact, she finds work as a maid with one of the employment agencies in Fairview. Secretly, she begins to investigate the shadowy collision that left her father dead.
The maid isn’t a maid. And she’s not Mexican, either. She’s Detective Mercado, a police officer from Havana, and she’s looking for answers: Who killed her father? Was it one of the smooth- talking Hollywood types? Was it a minion of the terrifying county sheriff? And why was her father, a celebrated defector to the United States, hiding in Colorado as the town ratcatcher?
Adrian McKinty’s live-wire prose crackles with intensity as we follow Mercado through the swells of emotion and violence that lead up to a final shocking confrontation.