Money Matters

In Brian Finney’s novel Money Matters, Jenny agrees to help her coworker look into a missing person. What she thinks will be a quick visit to a landlord eventually leads her to discover darker connections between Republican candidates, drug cartels, undocumented workers, and more.  The story is well-plotted, with plenty of moving pieces and different agendas.

With a part-time gig watching surveillance tapes and another watering plants, Jenny’s an unlikely sleuth. I felt like she took this challenge mostly because she was bored. But she stumbles into more information, and can’t let it go. She keeps uncovering new layers and new connections, turning her look into a missing ex-girlfriend into a high-stakes international drama. As she investigates, Jenny discovers more strength in herself, too.

Selfishness and money motivate the antagonists to do horrible things, a realistic motive, although some of the villains were a little too mustache-twirlingly evil for me. Jenny — and the reader — could always tell who’s good and who’s evil, because there’s not a lot of grey here. The plot really highlights the haves and have-nots in our society. Jenny, who’s just getting by on part-time work, sees both the extreme wealth of CEOs and political candidates, and the constant financials struggles of Felicia, Miguel and other undocumented workers. Money is power here, with wealthy men able to make problems disappear, and undocumented workers powerless to get their full paychecks.  This doesn’t just set the conflict in motion, it helps Jenny discover what she needs, too, and grow from being shruggy and accepting, to a young woman determining her own goals.

At times, the characters are told, not shown, to the reader. For example, hard-working Felicia is described as “fiercely independent” more than once, but we only really see her asking Jenny for help and asking her what to do next.  Still, I laughed at the descriptions of slacker Gary, Jenny’s “boyfriend” who really just wants to get stoned and play games.

Sometimes, the characters’ speech is stilted and unnatural, with oddly dated phrases from young characters and heavy plot exposition through dialogue. Even the most developed characters in the novel occasionally info-dumped on each other to move the plot along. This reminded me of The East End, another well-plotted story with occasionally flat characters.

The final pages are a letter from a young man who was deported back to a country he can’t remember. This brings the story back from an investigative adventure to a reminder of the very real human cost of deportation.