David Housewright Books In Order

Practice to Deceive

Housewright’s Edgar Award winning first novel, Penance, introduced readers to Holland Taylor, a wisecracking, cynical ex cop turned PI. Now Taylor takes on a shocking embezzlement case that puts millions of dollars, the reputations of the city’s most powerful people and even Taylor’s own life on the line…
‘Housewright follows up his Edgar winning debut with a greased lightning tale of scam and counterscam.’ Kirkus Reviews’A colorful cast of characters.’ Cleveland Plain Dealer’Excellent.’ Nevada Barr’Clever…
believable…
lively.’ Philadelphia Inquirer

Dearly Departed

St. Paul private eye Holland Taylor is back in Edgar Award winning author David Housewright’s third lively tale. Private investigator Holland Taylor has a low opinion of sleazy lawyer Hunter Truman and listens reluctantly to Truman’s plea to help him find the missing Alison Emerton, whom the police suspect has been murdered. But when Truman plays the tape Alison left and shows Taylor her photograph, the elusive woman captures his curiosity. Could it be that Alison is not dead but has disappeared to start life under a new identity? If so, why? As Taylor investigates, he meets people who loved her, or hated her sometimes both. They include her secretive parents; her handsome, angry ex husband; a wary former lover; her very loyal women friends; and the man the police had once held as the chief suspect. Taylor’s investigation leads him to a rural Wisconsin town, where he meets two men very much involved in Alison’s life and uncovers big money plans involving a resort and proposed gambling casino: schemes with stakes high enough that they will cost not only fortunes but lives. As Taylor exposes the motives of the players and untangles Alison’s strange story, events come together in an explosive finale.

A Hard Ticket Home

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 rising stars.

Tin City

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, Edgar Winner David Housewright’s second Mac McKenzie novel is clever, compelling, and thoroughly enjoyable.

Pretty Girl Gone

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.

Dead Boyfriends

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 Mac knows he’s in jail, missing an important date with his girlfriend and reliving nightmares he thought he d finally left behind and he s vowing payback for all of it. If that means sticking his nose into a crime 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, Mac finds himself again fighting the influence of a shadowy figure who controls more of what goes on in the Twin Cities than a rational voter would believe. And then there are the unidentified thugs who kill a witness and rough up him and his female lawyer ally. Soon Mac 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.

Madman on a Drum

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.

Jelly’s Gold

Rushmore McKenzie, a retired St. Paul policeman and unexpected millionaire, often works as an unlicensed P.I., 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 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.

The Taking of Libbie, SD

A grifter cons an entire town using McKenzie’s name, leaving the real McKenzie facing an angry town with nothing left to lose 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.