Something Wicked

February 7, 2022
Edgar winner Housewright’s entertaining 19th novel featuring unlicensed Twin Cities PI Rushmore McKenzie finds McKenzie, who nearly died after being shot in 2021’s What Doesn’t Kill Us, ready to retire. McKenzie’s wife, Nina Truhler, has other plans for him after a former colleague of hers, Jenness Crawford, asks for help. Jenness’s family owns a castle built in 1883 that they operate as a resort hotel in Redding, Minn. Due to the pandemic, the hotel has struggled, and the family has argued over what to do with the property. Jenness wants to keep the hotel operating, but she suspects one of the family members who want to cash out may have killed her grandmother a month earlier. McKenzie and Nina travel to Redding to investigate. Housewright vividly depicts the lakeside castle and the surrounding area while nicely integrating the pandemic into the plot, addressing some of the catastrophic effects it has had on restaurants and hotels. As usual, the main draw is McKenzie, with his dry sense of humor, keen intelligence, and moral code. New and established fans will be pleased. Agent: Alison Picard, Alison J. Picard Agency.

March 1, 2022
Unlicensed Minneapolis private eye Rushmore McKenzie answers a call to visit a disputed family home in rustic Redding for reasons that become less and less clear. Jenness Crawford, who used to work at Nina Truhler's trendy restaurant, Rickie's, hates to ask, but she's convinced that her grandmother Tess' recent death was murder, and could McKenzie please come out to Redding Castle to poke around? Since McKenzie, nicely recovered from getting shot on the job, is Nina's husband, it's no stretch to get him to the castle, but there seems to be nothing for him to do. Tess was 87 and probably died of natural causes in her locked bedroom, and even if she didn't, her body's been cremated, and Deidre Gardner, an old friend of McKenzie's from Minneapolis Homicide who's now chief of the City of Redding Police, assures him there'd be no way to prove murder. It seems more likely that Jen wants McKenzie at the castle to help sway the relatives who are inclined to sell the place to developer Cassandra Boeve, maybe by acting as if he's going to make an offer on it himself. Despite all the fuss kicked up by clashes between the White-supremacist Sons of Europa and the liberals of Redding Against Hate, everything seems to hinge on a vote among Tess' five heirs. No sooner has the vote been taken, however, than one of the heirs is shot dead--no question of natural death this time--and the castle's prize paintings by Frederick Remington and James McNeill Whistler vanish. Maybe McKenzie will find something to do after all. So many inviting suspects that it really doesn't matter which of them is guilty.

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March 1, 2022
Rushmore McKenzie was a cop for many years. Then he quit the force, claimed a large reward, and began working as an unlicensed private eye. His last case nearly killed him, and he was planning to retire (he is a millionaire, after all), but his wife, Nina, who pretty much demanded he retire, is now asking him to take one just one more case. A friend of hers is embroiled in a bitter family dispute over what to do with a nineteenth-century castle that was owned by the friend's grandmother, and Nina would like Rushmore to act as a sort of mediator. Oh, and by the way, maybe he could find out whether the grandmother was murdered? You have to like a series in which the latest book is just as good as the first book and all the books in between. We're nineteen titles into this series, and there's no sign that Housewright is running out of stories or of the energy to tell them.

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