Twin Cities P.I. Mac McKenzie Novels
14 primary works • 17 total works
Book 1
Edgar-winner David Housewright's new P.I. series features ex-cop Rushmore McKenzie, who has more money, and more time, than he knows what to do with. In fact, whether he's willing to admit it to himself or not, Mac is downright bored. Until he does a favour for a friend facing a family tragedy: when Stacy Carlson is diagnosed with leukaemia, the only one with the bone marrow to save her is her older sister Jamie. Trouble is, Jamie's been missing for years. Mac combs the backstreets of Minneapolis and finds her, only to realize that what he's looking for, and why, are not exactly what he'd imagined. A Hard Ticket Home is both funny and violent, gripping and gritty - and David Housewright serves notice that he's a crime writer to watch.
Book 2
Mac McKenzie spends his time doing favours for friends. His latest effort seems simple enough: Find out what's been killing his pal's honeybees. But with only a minimal amount of digging, McKenzie soon turns up a hornet's nest of trouble. A vicious hood named Frank Crosetti suddenly and mysteriously disappears leaving behind a rape and a lifeless body. With only the faintest of trails to follow and an angry group of federal agents gunning for him, Mac dives under- ground, taking a stack of cash and a small arsenal with him. Before long he's deep in the forgotten corners of the Cities, sniffing for any sign of Crosetti, unable to rest until he gets results.
Book 3
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. The First Lady is carrying an email that contains a nasty rumour about her husband, and the truth is buried decades deep in a small town's history. Of course Mac always has plenty of time on his hands and has experience handling such matters for his friends. So he heads straight into the governor's past, planning to poke around and see if he can stir up a little information. Before long, someone starts poking him back, and it's clear that he has stirred up nothing but trouble. Mac is soon shifting through a complex web of interlocking secrets and lies, some decades- old, and some rooted violently in the present day.
Book 4
Right up until they put him in jail, McKenzie thought the cops were kidding. After all, he did them a favour by stopping rookie cop from roughing up a distraught woman at a murder scene. Next thing he knows, he's reliving nightmares he thought he had left far behind him - and he's vowing Payback. If that means sticking his nose into an investigation, so be it. What appears to be a straightforward case of a cheating boyfriend, his alcoholic girlfriend and an opportune baseball bat proves far more complicated. As Mac digs deeper, he soon realises that the truth of this sordid crime may be as hard to find - and as hard to live with - as the justice he seeks.
Book 5
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 P.I., 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.
Book 6
Rushmore McKenzie, a retired St. Paul policeman and unexpected millionaire, often works as an unlicensed P.I., doing favours 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 20th 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.
Book 10
Rushmore McKenzie agrees to go undercover to help the ATF track a cache of stolen guns--after all, what could possible go wrong?
Rushmore McKenzie is both a millionaire and an unlicensed PI, which means he can afford to do the occasional favor and, as a former detective for the St. Paul (Minnesota) Police Department, he's got the necessary skills and connections to do them right. But this time, he's really stepped in it.
When the ATF gets a lead on a much sought-after cache of illegal guns near the Canadian border, they call McKenzie in to help them track down the elusive gunrunners. Their only lead is a guy who is part of a small-time gang of armed robbers working north of the Twin Cities. Their idea is for McKenzie to infiltrate the group and wait for them to lead him to the guns. Their plan is to fix McKenzie with a false identity as a serious bad guy and then fake an escape with the captured gang member. Which seemed like a bad idea to McKenzie at the time, but even he had no idea just how bad things were going to get.
Book 11
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 - 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 is 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.
Book 12
"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 time the police arrive, and the EMTs and ambulances have taken care of the immediate injuries, the truck is long gone"--
Book 13
Since becoming an unlikely millionaire and quitting the St. Paul Police Department, Rushmore McKenzie has been working as an unlicensed private investigator, basically doing favours 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 get it back. 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.
Book 14
"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"--
Book 18
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 do 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? And the answer to that might be what stands between life and death.
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 do 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? And the answer to that might be what stands between life and death.
Book 19
Rushmore McKenzie was a detective with the St. Paul, Minnesota PD until unlikely events made him first a millionaire and then a retiree. Since then, he's been an occasional unofficial private investigator - looking into things for friends and friends of friends - until his most recent case put him into a coma and nearly into a coffin. Now, at the insistence of his better half Nina Truhler, he is again retired.
That is, until a friend of Nina finds herself in dire straights and in desperate need of a favor. Jenness Crawford's grandmother owned the family castle - a nineteenth century castle that has been operating as a hotel and resort for over a hundred years. Since her grandmother's death, the heirs have been squabbling over what to do with it. Some want to keep it in the family and running as a hotel. Some want to sell it and reap the millions a developer will pay for it. And Jenness is convinced that someone - probably in the latter group - killed her grandmother. A conclusion with which the police do not agree. Now McKenzie finds himself back in action, trapped in a castle filled with feuding relatives with conflicting agendas, long serving retainers, and a possible murderer. And if McKenzie makes one wrong move, it could be lights out.
That is, until a friend of Nina finds herself in dire straights and in desperate need of a favor. Jenness Crawford's grandmother owned the family castle - a nineteenth century castle that has been operating as a hotel and resort for over a hundred years. Since her grandmother's death, the heirs have been squabbling over what to do with it. Some want to keep it in the family and running as a hotel. Some want to sell it and reap the millions a developer will pay for it. And Jenness is convinced that someone - probably in the latter group - killed her grandmother. A conclusion with which the police do not agree. Now McKenzie finds himself back in action, trapped in a castle filled with feuding relatives with conflicting agendas, long serving retainers, and a possible murderer. And if McKenzie makes one wrong move, it could be lights out.
Book 20
When asked to investigate a murder in a seemingly idyllic Minnesota town, Rushmore McKenzie finds that all the evidence points directly at his client, in the next installment in David Housewright's McKenzie novels, In a Hard Wind.
NO. 8 OF 1
Rushmore McKenzie is a former cop, current millionaire, and an occasional unlicensed P.I. who does favours 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.
NO. 7 OF 1
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 then 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.
NO. 9 OF 1
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 favour. 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 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...