Ex-St. Paul cop Rushmore McKenzie has more time, and more money, than he knows what to do with. In fact, when he’s willing to admit it to himself (and he usually isn’t), Mac is downright bored. Until he decides to do a favor for a friend facing a family tragedy: nine-year-old Stacy Carlson has been diagnosed with leukemia, and the only one with the matching bone marrow that can save her is her older sister, Jamie. Trouble is, Jamie ran away from home years ago.

Mac begins combing the backstreets of the Twin Cities, tracking down Jamie’s last known associates. He starts with the expected pimps and drug dealers, but the path leads surprisingly to some of the Cities’ most respected businessmen, as well as a few characters far more unsavory than the street hustlers he anticipated. As bullets fly and bodies drop, Mac persists, only to find that what he’s looking for, and why, are not exactly what he’d imagined.

David Housewright’s uncanny ability to turn the Twin Cities into an exotic, brooding backdrop for noir fiction, and his winning, witty hero Rushmore McKenzie, serve as a wicked one-two punch in A Hard Ticket Home, a series debut that reinforces Housewright’s well-earned reputation as one of crime fiction’s stars.

Several years ago, Rushmore McKenzie became an unexpected millionaire and set about doing not much of anything. Now, showing up at his doorstep is the insurance company that paid the settlement that made him rich–and they want a favor. Someone has stolen a very expensive gem from a local art museum and is willing to ransom it back. The only condition is that McKenzie has to be the go between. And this is no ordinary gem–it is a jade sculpture with a history going back to the Qing Dynasty and a reputed curse that stories claim has ruined or killed everyone who has ever owned it. McKenzie agrees to help, but what starts out as a simple ransom quickly becomes complicated.

Suddenly other parties–including the State Department and a mysterious woman named Heavenly–start showing up, wanting McKenzie to turn over the gem to them. When the murdered body of one of the thieves turns up in a snow drift, it looks like the cursed Jade Lily has claimed its latest victim. And there may well be more to follow.

Right up until they put him in jail, McKenzie thought the cops were kidding. After all, he did them a favor by stopping a rookie cop from roughing up a distraught woman at a murder scene. But the next thing he knows, he’s in jail, missing an important date with his girlfriend and reliving nightmares he thought he had left far behind him–and vowing payback for all of it. If that means sticking his nose into an ongoing murder investigation, well, he’s done it before.

Only what appears to be a straightforward case of a cheating boyfriend, his alcoholic girlfriend, and an opportune baseball bat proves far more complicated than the police are willing to accept. More disconcerting, as he investigates, McKenzie finds himself fighting the influence of a shadowy figure who controls more of what goes on in the Twin Cities than a rational voter would believe. Then there are the unidentified thugs who kill a witness and rough up him and his female lawyer ally. Soon McKenzie realizes that the truth of this sordid crime may be as hard to find–and as hard to live with–as the justice he seeks.

A case of stolen property takes a darker, deadlier turn.

Louise Wykoff is arguably the most recognizable woman living in Minnesota, known for her presence in over one hundred paintings by the late and brilliant Randolph McInnis. Louise, known better as “That Wykoff Woman,” was just a young apprentice when her intimate representation and the fact of the McInnis’s marriage caused rumors to fly–and Louise to hide away for decades.All of McInnis’s paintings are in museums or known private collections, until Louise confesses to having three more that no one has ever heard of–and now they’ve been stolen. Rushmore McKenzie, an occasional unlicensed private investigator, agrees to look into the theft. As he investigates, following clues that appear far too straightforward, he finds himself on the wrong side of the bars wondering if the trail might be deeper and darker than he’s been led to believe. Hours away from St. Paul, deep in the nature of Grand Marais, the truth seems murkier–and deadlier–than usual.

A past case comes back to haunt Twin Cities P. I. McKenzie as a stolen sum of money threatens to resurface in From the Grave, the next mystery in David Housewright’s award-winning series.

Once a police detective in St. Paul, Minnesota, Rushmore McKenzie became an unlikely millionaire and an occasional unlicensed private investigator, doing favors for friends. But this time, he finds himself in dire need of working on his own behalf.

His dear friend and first love Shelby Dunston attends a public reading by a psychic medium with the hope of connecting with her grandfather one final time. Instead, she hears McKenzie’s name spoken by the psychic in connection with a huge sum of stolen–and missing–money.

Caught in a world of psychic mediums, with a man from his past with a stake in the future, and more than one party willing to go to great and deadly lengths to get involved, McKenzie must figure out just how much he is willing to believe–like his life depends on it–before everything takes a much darker turn.

Rushmore McKenzie is a former cop, current millionaire, and an occasional unlicensed PI who does favors for friends. Yet he has reservations when his girlfriend’s daughter asks him to help her father Jason Truhler, the ex-husband of McKenzie’s girlfriend, and a man in serious trouble. En route from St. Paul to a Canadian blues festival on Highway 61, he met a girl, blacked out, and awoke hours later in a strange motel, with the girl’s murdered body on the floor. Slipping away unnoticed and heading home, he thought he’d got away–until he started getting texts with photos of the body and demands for blackmail payments he couldn’t pay.

McKenzie soon finds that Truhler was set up in a modified honey trap, designed to blackmail him. But Truhler’s version wasn’t exactly the truth either. And McKenzie now finds himself trapped in the middle of a very dangerous game with some of the most powerful men in the state on one side and some of the deadliest on the other.

Rushmore McKenzie, a retired St. Paul policeman and unexpected millionaire, often works as an unlicensed PI, doing favors as it suits him. When graduate students Ivy Flynn and Josh Berglund show up with a story about $8 million in missing stolen gold from the ’30s, McKenzie is intrigued.

In the early twentieth century, St. Paul, Minnesota, was an open city–a place where gangsters could come and stay unmolested by the local authorities. Frank “Jelly” Nash was suspected of masterminding a daring robbery of gold bars in 1933, but, before he could unload it, he was killed in the Kansas City Massacre. His gold, they believe, is still somewhere in St. Paul.

But they aren’t the only ones looking. So are a couple of two-bit thugs, a woman named Heavenly, a local big-wig, and others. When Berglund is shot dead outside of Ivy’s apartment, the treasure hunt turns unexpectedly deadly. McKenzie is looking for more than a legendary stash from seventy-five years ago, he’s looking for a killer and the long-hidden truth behind Jelly’s gold.

Once a police detective in St. Paul, Minnesota, Rushmore McKenzie has become an unlikely millionaire and an occasional unlicensed private investigator, doing favors for friends. The favor, this time, is for a friend of a friend–Erin Peterson, a local business person and owner of a growing food company called Salsa Girl. Someone seems to have a beef with her: the outside locks on her factory having been systematically filled with superglue. But for some reason, Erin doesn’t want to report this harassment to the police. As a favor to his poker buddy and hockey teammate Ian, McKenzie agrees to stop by and chat with Erin.

At first Erin denies there’s anything going on and then, when the harassment escalates and threatens her business, she also asks for McKenzie’s help. The further McKenzie digs into the situation, the more complicated–and deadly–it becomes. And somewhere, in the middle of it all, is Erin, playing all sides against the middle, leading McKenzie to wonder if you ever really know who your friends are.

Homicide cop Bobby Dunston’s daughter has been kidnapped, taken in broad daylight on a city street in the middle of September. The kidnappers demand a million dollars and force Dunston to get the ransom from his friend McKenzie. It soon becomes apparent to the two of them that one of the kidnappers is childhood pal Scottie, a once aspiring drummer now gone astray, and that the kidnapping is payback for “crimes” committed in their past.

McKenzie, former cop and now unlicensed PI, handles the ransom drop-off and the child is returned safely. But Scottie is found dead–brutally murdered–and someone has taken out an open contract on McKenzie, using his own money to pay for it. Dodging attempts on his life from assassins of all shapes and sizes, McKenzie now has precious little time to uncover the mastermind behind it all if he’s going to survive.

P.I. Holland Taylor reluctantly agrees to help Minnesota gubernatorial candidate and media darling Carol Catherine Monroe with the skeletons rattling in her closest. But the murder of an innocent campaign worker teaches Taylor some sins can never be forgotten.

Rushmore “Mac” McKenzie has a lot of old girlfriends, but only one went on to marry the current governor of the state of Minnesota. And only one is calling him with a desperate request to meet in secret. First Lady Lindsay Barrett is carrying an anonymous e-mail that contains the makings of an ugly rumor about her husband, the man about to run for higher office–perhaps even the highest office. Someone says they have evidence that Jack Barrett killed his high school sweetheart. Lindsay says it’s an outright lie, but the truth lies buried decades in the past in the small town where the governor grew up.

Of course, Mac, who’s richer than he needs to be and always has plenty of time on his hands, is in the business of handling such matters for his friends. So he packs up and drives straight into the governor’s past with the brilliantly conceived plan to poke around and see if he can stir up a little information. He’s soon got goons of all sorts poking him back, including a nasty little group of political movers and shakers who aren’t above kidnapping and murder to protect their interests. It’s clear that his little plan has stirred up nothing but trouble.

With no choice but to stick to it, he continues shifting through a complex web of interlocking secrets and lies, some decades old and some rooted violently in the present day. It’s up to Mac to sort truth from untruth before a vicious rumor becomes a political nightmare–or worse, before the “outright lie” is proved a solid, irrefutable fact.

Since becoming an unlikely millionaire and quitting the St. Paul Police Department, Rushmore McKenzie has been working as an unlicensed private investigator, basically doing favors for friends and people in need. But even for him, this latest job is unusual. He’s been asked to find a stolen Stradivarius, known as the Countess Borromeo, that only the violinist seems to want him to find.

Stolen from a locked room in a B&B in the violinist’s former hometown of Bayfield, Wisconsin, the violin is valued at $4 million and is virtually irreplaceable. But the foundation that owns it and their insurance company refuses to think about buying it back from the thief (or thieves). However, Paul Duclos, the violinist who has played it for the past twelve years, is desperate to get it back and will pay out of his own pocket to do so.

Though it’s not his usual sort of case, McKenzie is intrigued and decides to try and help, which means going against the local police, the insurance company, the FBI’s Art Crime division, and his own lawyer’s advice. And, as he quickly learns, there’s a lot more going on than the mere theft of a priceless instrument.

Riley Brodin is the granddaughter of Walter Muehlenhaus–a man as rich, powerful, and connected as anyone since the days of J. P. Morgan. Despite her family’s connections, it’s McKenzie she reaches out to when her relatively new boyfriend goes missing. Despite his reservations about getting involved with the Muehlenhaus family–again–Mac McKenzie agrees to look for one Juan Carlos Navarre. What he finds, though, is a man who appears to be a ghost.

The house–mansion, really–he told Riley he owned is actually a rental, barely lived in and practically devoid of personal effects. The restaurant he claimed to own is owned by another and Navarre merely an investor. He apparently has no friends, no traceable past, and McKenzie isn’t the only one looking for him. Whoever Juan Carlos Navarre is and wherever he’s gone, the one thing that’s clear is that he’s trouble, and is perhaps someone–as Riley’s family makes clear–better out of the picture. Unfortunately for everyone, McKenzie likes trouble and trouble likes him.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, along with his FBI pal Harry, make Rushmore McKenzie an offer he can’t refuse–no matter how hard he tries: take on the identity of a wanted fugitive, escape to the upper reaches of Minnesota, and infiltrate a crew of armed robbers known as “The Iron Range Bandits.” His mission: help retrieve a cache of stolen weapons before they’re used to wreak havoc on the Canadian-US border.

But there are a few catches. First, the bandits aren’t the hardcore criminals they seem to be, although the bent sheriff deputies chasing them certainly are. Then there is the stripper and her nefarious manager, the ex-soldier trying to prove he’s a man, the minor-league crime czar who uses blackmail to force McKenzie to rob a highly guarded bank vault, and an enigmatic thug who finds love in all the wrong places. Not to mention the gunrunners who pride themselves on shooting first and asking questions later.

And if that’s not enough to make him wonder why he didn’t stay home with his lady love Nina Truhler, McKenzie soon learns that the promises of an ambitious assistant US attorney to the contrary, he is absolutely on his own.

Rushmore McKenzie is a retired cop, an unexpected millionaire, and an occasional unlicensed private investigator. So it isn’t the biggest surprise in the world when he’s attacked and kidnapped from his home–McKenzie has more than a few enemies out there with a grudge against him. But it is a surprise when it turns out his kidnapping is a case of mistaken identity.

McKenzie was taken to the small plains town of Libbie, South Dakota, which just lost pretty much everything it had to a con man using McKenzie’s name. Using a scam involving a new shopping mall, the grifter apparently stole all the money electronically from the bank and disappeared, leaving behind a devastated town full of people with many reasons to hate him. To that list of enemies, he’s just added McKenzie who is now determined to help the devastated townspeople, as well as catch and punish the weasel besmirching his reputation.

Mac McKenzie is rich. So rich that he’s left his job as a Twin Cities police officer and spends his time doing favors large and small for friends. So when an old Marine buddy of his father’s calls with a request, Mac takes the time to help him out. And it is one of the stranger favors he’s ever been asked: The elderly Mr. Mosley, a beekeeper, wants Mac to find out why his bees are suddenly dying in droves.

Mac does some digging, and before long turns up a hornet’s nest of trouble in the person of Frank Crosetti, a new neighbor on the property abutting Mosley’s bees. What started out as an innocent investigation into some unregulated pesticide quickly turns lethal. Crosetti sticks around long enough to make some very specific threats, then disappears into the wind leaving behind a vicious rape, a lifeless body, and a very angry McKenzie bursting for someone to blame.

With only the faintest of trails to follow and a suspicious group of federal agents gunning for him, Mac dives underground, taking only a stash of cash and a small arsenal with him on his undercover mission. Before long Mac’s deep in the forgotten corners of Minneapolis sniffing for any sign of Crosetti, unable to rest until he gets results.

Combining engaging humor and wit with action-packed storytelling, Housewright’s second Mac McKenzie novel is clever, compelling, and thoroughly enjoyable.

During one of the first heavy snows of the winter, on the Interstate outside the Twin Cities, Rushmore McKenzie is behind a truck behaving erratically when the man in the truck bed dumps a body out onto the road, right in front of McKenzie’s car. McKenzie avoids hitting the body, a bound woman who is just barely alive, but his stopped car in the middle of the road starts a chain of accidents, resulting in a thirty-seven car pile-up. By the time the police arrive, and the EMTs and ambulances have taken care of the immediate injuries, the truck is long gone.

The injured woman awakens with no memories–not of the accident, not of anything–and is labeled by the police as Unidentified Woman #15. With few leads, the detective in charge, McKenzie’s former partner and old friend Bobby Dunston, turns to McKenzie for a favor. Now McKenzie has to try to identify the grievously injured woman and find out who tied her up and dumped her on the freeway to die. And why.

Rushmore McKenzie has been shot and lies in a coma, while the police and his friends desperately try to find out what McKenzie was doing and who tried to kill him

Rushmore McKenzie, former St. Paul police detective and unexpected millionaire, does the occasional, unofficial private detective work–mostly favors for friends. He’s faced kidnappers, domestic terrorists, art thieves, among others, and had a hand in solving some of the most perplexing mysteries of the Twin Cities. But this time, his prodigious luck and intuition may have finally failed him: he was shot in the back by an unknown assailant and lies in a coma.His childhood friend, Lt. Bobby Dunston of the St. Paul Police Department, assigns his best detective to the case while other figures–on both sides of the law–pursue the truth. What was he investigating, what did he learn that so threatened someone that they tried to kill him? What does a sketchy bar in the wrong part of town, the area’s prominent tech millionaire family, drug dealers, investment bankers, and a mysterious woman who left an unknown package for McKenzie all have in common? The answer to that might be what stands between life and death.

Once a police detective in St. Paul, Minnesota, Rushmore McKenzie has become not only an unlikely millionaire, but an occasional unlicensed private investigator, doing favors for friends and people in need. When his stepdaughter Erica asks him for just such a favor, McKenzie doesn’t have it in him to refuse. Even though it sounds like a very bad idea right from the start.

The father of Malcolm Harris, a college friend of Erica’s, was found murdered a year ago in a park in New Brighton, a town just outside the Twin Cities. With no real clues and all the obvious suspects with concrete alibis, the case has long since gone cold. As McKenzie begins poking around, he soon discovers another unsolved murder that’s tangentially related to this one. And all connections seem to lead back to a group of friends the victim was close with. But all McKenzie has is a series of odd, even suspicious, coincidences–until someone decides to make it all that more serious and personal.