Mac McKenzie Books

When a friend is diagnosed with leukemia and needs a bone marrow transplant from her long-lost older sister, former cop Rushmore McKenzie embarks on an investigation that takes him to Minneapolis in search of the missing woman. Reprint.

Asked to discover what has been killing his friend's honeybees, Twin Cities private detective Mac McKenzie finds himself up to his ears in trouble with a case involving a vicious thug who mysteriously vanishes, irate federal agents, rape, and murder. Reprint.

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 rumor about her husband, and the truth is buried decades deep in a small town's history. Of course McKenzie always has plenty of time on his hands and is in the business of 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. McKenzie is soon shifting through a complex web of interlocking secrets and lies, some decades-old, and some rooted violently in the present day. Praise for PRETTY GIRL GONE: “Housewright’s unapologetically flawed hero charms, while the clean plot lines, palpable Minnesota winter and understated humor make this a good, satisfying read.” — Publishers Weekly “This is the third McKenzie mystery, and it’s turning into quite an interesting series: solid premise, tight plotting, and this time more depth in character development, as Housewright explores McKenzie’s emotional side.” — Booklist “ Pretty Girl Gone is an incredible addition to ‘Cold Case’ mysteries, joining the likes of recent books by Michael Connelly, KJ Erickson, Mary Logue, and Reed Farrell Coleman. Housewright artfully portrays the hopelessness of a group of men who’s defining moment happened when they were teenager’s; of pitiful lives spent chasing a memory soured by tragedy and deceit... McKenzie is an entertaining and engaging character, and in this, the 3rd novel in the series (following A Hard Ticket Home and Tin City ), appears all too human... Pretty Girl Gone is a complex, thoroughly enjoyable addition to what is becoming one of our favorite mystery series.” — CrimeSpree Magazine “(Housewright is one) of Minnesota’s most dependable practitioners of the craft... McKenzie is good company...with a wry sense of humor, often aimed at himself, and a quick, accurate take on people and places. While certainly not an errant knight in the tradition of Raymond Chandler and Robert B. Parker, he’s a good man who’s wise enough to know that he will disappoint himself.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

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.

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.

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.

In David Housewright's The Taking of Libbie, SD , a grifter cons an entire town using Mac 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.

Mac McKenzie returns with a too-personal case that leads him up the legendary Highway 61 in the latest in David Housewright's awardwinning series Rushmore McKenzie is a former cop, current millionaire, and an occasional unlicensed P.I. 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.

A stolen gem with a tragic history, a curse and a million dollar ransom is Mac McKenzie's latest case, in David Housewright's Curse of the Jade Lily 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 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 on 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…

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.

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 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, in The Devil May Care by David Housewright.

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. 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, find out who tied her up and dumped on the freeway to die. And why.

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 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.

Looking into an unsolved murder as a favor, McKenzie soon uncovers either the strangest set of coincidences or the sites of a very real, very deadly conspiracy. 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.

A seemingly simple investigation, done as a favor for a friend, takes McKenzie down a dark and twisted path in Like to Die , the next mystery in David Housewright’s award-winning series. 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.

An investigation of missing property takes a darker turn near Lake Superior in Dead Man’s Mistress , the next mystery in David Housewright’s award-winning McKenzie series. 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’s willing to believe―like his life depends on it―before everything takes a much darker turn.

In David Housewright's next novel featuring the beloved Rushmore McKenzie What Doesn't Kill Us ―McKenzie has been shot and lies in a coma while the police and his friends desperately try to find out what he 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 McKenzie 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? As time slowly begins to run out, the answer to those questions might be what stands between life and death.

In David Housewright's next hardboiled mystery Something Wicked , Rushmore McKenzie, who promised to retire after his last nearly-fatal case, gets talked into doing an old friend a favor involving a castle, a family fighting over an inheritance, and at least one mysterious death. 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.

Once a homicide detective in St. Paul, Minnesota, Rushmore McKenzie is, through a series of unlikely events, both a millionaire and an occasional private investigator. As an unofficial PI, McKenzie only looks into the occasional situation for friends or friends of friends. Jeanette Carrell stretches McKenzie’s guidelines but she's in a bind. She's been arrested, indicted, and about to go on trial for murder. The body of the victim was found buried in a shallow grave at the far edge of her property. The victim was not only a neighbor, he was real estate developer accused of tricking a man with dementia, a friend of Carrell's, into signing away his property for development, property that he'd worked to keep pristine. When the developer was last seen, Carrell was heard threatening to kill him. Even more damning, a potential witness swears she saw Carrell digging near the grave site shortly after the victim disappeared. The final nail in the proverbial coffin is her alibi―she has none. With all the evidence―motive and means and opportunity―pointing to her guilt, and precious little in her defense, perhaps the most confusing aspect is Carrell’s calm attitude. Rushmore McKenzie is now faced with a challenging case―how to protect Carrell and unearth the truth of what really happened when all the circumstantial evidence is against her.

When his wife finds the body of an Army veteran in the lake, it is inevitable that former cop, now unofficial P.I. Rushmore McKenzie will get enmeshed in a complicated case of possible murder. It all starts with the body in the water—on what should be the first boat day of the season, McKenzie’s wife Nina finds a dead Army vet. As the dock owner and the insurance companies claim that it was suicide, despite the deceased, E.J. Woods, having no obvious reason to kill himself, his widow starts acting suspiciously. McKenzie finds himself pulled into the fight when Naveah, the victim’s daughter, convinced her father was murdered, asks him to investigate. Further complicating the situation are uncooperative boaters, allegations of PTSD, and the simple fact that there was no reason for E.J. to be in the water. McKenzie’s investigation unearths not only the petty squabbles surrounding the lake and its dock, but details of her father’s past that Naveah is perhaps better off not knowing. With Nina haunted by dreams of the body and the legal fight over cause of death becoming increasingly nasty, McKenzie may be the only one interested in finding justice for E.J.— and uncovering the truth before another person dies.