From the Grave (McKenzie Series #17)

by David Housewright

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250212177
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	07/28/2020
Series:	Rushmore McKenzie Series , #17
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.30(d)

About the Author

DAVID HOUSEWRIGHT has won the Edgar Award and is the three-time winner of the Minnesota Book Award for his crime fiction, which includes the modern noir Twin Cities P.I. Mac McKenzie series (starting with A Hard Ticket Home). He is a past president of the Private Eye Writers of America (PWA). He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Editorial Reviews

03/16/2020

Rushmore “Mac” McKenzie’s past comes back to haunt him, perhaps literally, in Edgar winner Housewright’s fun, fast-moving 17th outing for the onetime St. Paul, Minn., cop turned unlicensed detective (after 2019’s Dead Man’s Mistress). During a lecture, a psychic medium channels a dark presence who talks about a large sum of money and repeats the name McKenzie. The presence calls for McKenzie’s death before it will reveal the location of the money. A friend in the audience later relays all this to Mac, who thinks the presence, if it exists, is Leland Hayes, a criminal Mac shot dead 25 years earlier in the aftermath of a bank robbery, from which the money was never recovered. Mac is soon caught up in the world of psychics, not so reality TV, and very real physical threats by those seeking the lost treasure. The appealing Mac and his cohorts engage in amusing banter as they attempt to locate the pilfered cash before someone sends Mac off to the great beyond. Housewright leaves it tantalizingly ambiguous whether Leland’s spirit is real. Readers will be entertained either way. Agent: Alison Picard, Alison J. Picard Agency. (May)

Publishers Weekly

"Witty and wonderful." —Minneapolis Star-Tribune

From the Publisher

2020-03-02
St. Paul private eye Rushmore McKenzie (Dead Man’s Mistress, 2019, etc.) gets a price put on his head by someone hot for revenge: a man he killed more than 20 years ago.

Psychics can see the future; mediums can contact the dead. Psychic medium Hannah Braaten is a double threat who can do both. At a reading attended by McKenzie’s childhood crush Shelby Dunston, Hannah reveals impossibly intimate personal details about half a dozen attendees before ending with a walloping climax: the news that Leland Hayes, whose armored-truck heist of $654,321 ended 22 years ago when McKenzie, hot in pursuit of the thief as a member of the force, shot him dead, is willing to tell his son and accomplice, ex-con Ryan Hayes, where the money is if only Ryan will kill McKenzie. “Dead men do not talk from the grave,” McKenzie tells himself when he hears the news. “They certainly don’t arrange assassinations.” Even so, it’s a gorgeous setup, enriched even further by the entrance of up-and-coming psychic medium Kayla Janas, whose astral contacts lead Bobby Dunston to the body of missing housewife Ruth Nowak even though her readings aren’t quite as reliable as Hannah’s, maybe because she’s still a college freshman. As the two mediums angle to land a contract that will star them in Model Medium, a new TV series, McKenzie, Shelby, and Nina Truhler, his live-in lover, all worry that McKenzie’s own contract may be canceled. And evidently with reason: Shortly after he transfers the tracking device on his car to a pesky neighbor’s vehicle, that neighbor is found dead. And there’s mounting evidence that the late Leland Hayes, concerned that Ryan might not take up his deal, is offering it to “anyone who will listen.”

It’s a disappointment but not a surprise that the payoff doesn’t fulfill the promise of this premise. What could?

Kirkus Reviews