Unintended consequence
New novel an Uruguayan romp you need to go on

In a first for Murder Ink – and I suspect a rarity in U.S. publishing – we have the pleasure of reading a book set in Montevideo, Uruguay. We take a bird’s eye view of the hijacking of an armored truck by a gang of brain-dead crooks that goes terribly wrong. After an unintended explosion and fire, shooting and yelling, the heist goes even wronger. Ultimately, a woman who was invited to come spectate by a man she had recently met walks off with all the money.  

“The Hand that Feeds You,” by Mercedes Rosende and translated colorfully from Uruguayan Spanish by Tim Gutteridge, is a romp of unintended consequences. The burlesque of characters is made easy to love and pity at the same time amid a very serious crime where people are killed and nobody really cares. 

Rosende is a crafty writer, perhaps from also being a lawyer and journalist in her hometown of Montevideo, but you realize after only a few pages that the storyteller is nowhere to be found in the story. That’s a genuine skill for a fiction writer, most of whom – especially the luminaries of supermarket fiction – can’t stay out of their stories and don’t even know they have a presence. With Rosende’s “The Hand that Feeds You,” all the characters are a half-bubble off center, reminiscent of the charming books of Sicilian writer Andrea Camilleri and the exquisite 1994 novel “Pereira Declares” by Antonio Tabucchi. 

Rosende’s performers, like Camilleri’s and Tabucchi’s, are embodiments of Laurence Peter’s 1969 “The Peter Principle,” wherein people in a hierarchy are inevitably elevated to their level of incompetence. And here, in Old Town Montevideo, the rogue gang of miscreants botch things so thoroughly that one Ursula López grabs her floundering new friend Diego and drives off with seven bags of money in a getaway van that low-functioning Ricardo left the keys in.

When the fire lets up, the smoke clears and the innate confusion sharpens, the ill-equipped and stunned thieves begin to scatter, leaving behind Ricardo “Hobo” Prieto, who’s looking perhaps dead from a bullet to the head. 

Retirement-aged Ursula, who showed up to watch and embolden Diego with a revolver in her purse, proves to be the exception to the Peter Principle. As we turn to page 23, we begin the story of this ordinary woman with unfortunate taste in men – including her father she quarrels with every night in his recliner that’s been empty for a long time after his death. She goes on to outthink and outmaneuver the unscrupulous attorney Antinucci, who assembled the goons and bankrolled the caper. She also manages to evade the notoriously numerous but lazy South American police and calculates how she and Diego can stay alive and vanish with all the money.

It would be easy to slip in a spoiler now in an attempt to describe the imagination of Rosende and how this crime-in-a-crime concludes. “The Hand that Feeds You” is a romp that you need to go on. I’d be able to tell you the moves it takes for one woman to attempt a heist of a heist, how a woman more experienced in housekeeping may be able to outsmart the white-collar and dirty-shirted criminals, or tell you where she drops a stitch or gives up Diego and the money and gets fed to the sharks. But there’s more to “The Hand that Feeds You” than fascinating scheming or predictable consequences in stealing from thieves. 

I’m guessing that Rosende began “The Hands that Feeds You” without knowing where the story was going or who most of the players would be. I’ll guess again that Rosende came with her character Ursula, maybe she saw a need for a foil in weak-kneed Diego, and likely she knew she’d open with a calamitous armored truck robbery.

Rosende seemed also to have wanted to paint the Montevideo personality, and she appears to have wanted to sketch the South American country that few know anything about. I reckon that Rosende also cheers on the surgically successful crime, as many of us always hope for. I’d bet, too, that Rosende had fun writing “The Hand that Feeds You” and wrote an entire draft of the book before even a chapter-to-chapter edit. Speaking of which, she has titled the six sections of the book: The Escape; A Month Before the Escape; The Escape; The Day of the Escape; The Escape; The End. 

Rosende was a passenger on this journey, not a driver, and these section headings are her sticky notes. With her cunning talent for writing, she produced an exciting caper that shouldn’t be missed if you think you can stand the tension.

“The Hand that Feeds You” is from the prescient Bitter Lemon Press in London, a preeminent publisher of exceptional crime fiction. It was released March 21 in paperback. At $15.95, it’s a bargain for the quality and cheaper yet with your 15%?Murder Ink discount at Maria’s Bookshop. ?