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 sa...

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 t...

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 Bright...

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 LilySeveral 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 b...

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 st...

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 Ril...

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 th...

David Housewright’s Edgar Award-winning Holland Taylor series returns with a case of murder resulting from tragic, twisted drama in an extremely wealthy family in Darkness, Sing Me a Song.Holland Taylor is a PI who does simple background checks and other mostly unchallenging cases. Still wounded by the long-ago death of his wife and daughter, and newly mourning a recently failed relationship, Taylor doesn’t have much interest in more challenging work. But ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 Mac 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...