David Housewright has 16 audiobooks on Listento.it, narrated by 10 narrators. The most-rated is Stealing the Countess.
Dead Man’s Mistress
Summary
A case of stolen property takes a darker, deadlier turn. Louise Wykoff is arguably the most recognizable woman living in Minnesota, known for her presence in over 100 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.
©2019 by David Housewright (P)2021 by Blackstone Publishing
Pretty Girl Gone
Summary
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.
©2006 David Housewright (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
Highway 61
Summary
Rushmore McKenzie is a former cop, current millionaire, and an occasional unlicensed PI 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.
©2011 David Housewright (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
Resort to Murder
Summary
An anthology of mystery stories set in Minnesota and written by Minnesota authors. All of the mysteries have at least one element in common: each tale takes place at a fictional, but perhaps hauntingly familiar, Minnesota resort.
©2008 Multiple authors (P)2008 Holton House Audio
The Last Kind Word
Summary
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 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.
©2013 David Housewright (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
Madman on a Drum
Summary
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 PI, 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.
©2008 David Housewright (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
Tin City
Summary
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, Housewright’s second Mac McKenzie novel is clever, compelling, and thoroughly enjoyable.
©2005 David Housewright (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
The Devil May Care
Summary
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’s 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.
©2014 David Housewright (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing
Penance
Summary
Holland Taylor is comfortable in interrogation rooms. For years the cold, dark cells of the St. Paul Police Department homicide squad were his turf, and with the help of his partner he wrung confessions out of countless killers. But that was long ago. Tonight Taylor is on the other side of the desk. Tonight he is the suspect. Taylor's career in the department ended after his wife and daughter were killed in a drunk driving accident. The culprit, John Brown, was sentenced to a measly six years for vehicular manslaughter, and Taylor vowed bloody vengeance in front of open court. After a few months of freedom, Brown is shot dead, and Taylor, now a private investigator, is called in as the obvious suspect. The death turns out to be linked to Taylor's current case, involving state representative and gubernatorial candidate Carol Catherine Monroe, who is being blackmailed by an old boyfriend. He didn't kill John Brown, but he will find out who did even if it means tearing the Twin Cities apart from the inside out.
©1995 David Housewright (P)2012 HighBridge Company
Unidentified Woman #15
Summary
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 37-car pile-up. By 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 and find out who tied her up and dumped her on the freeway to die. And why.
©2015 David Housewright (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing
From the Grave
Summary
A past case comes back to haunt Twin Cities PI 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 is willing to believe - like his life depends on it - before everything takes a much darker turn.
©2020 David Housewright (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
Dead Boyfriends
Summary
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 he knows, he’s in jail, missing an important date with his girlfriend and reliving nightmares he thought he had left far behind him - and vowing payback for all of it. If that means sticking his nose into an ongoing murder 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, McKenzie finds himself fighting the influence of a shadowy figure who controls more of what goes on in the Twin Cities than a rational voter would believe. Then there are the unidentified thugs who kill a witness and rough up him and his female lawyer ally. Soon McKenzie 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.
©2007 David Housewright (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
The Taking of Libbie, SD
Summary
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 and 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.
©2010 David Housewright (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
Curse of the Jade Lily
Summary
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 sculpture 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 one 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.
©2012 David Housewright (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
A Hard Ticket Home
Summary
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 stars.
©2004 David Housewright (P)2020 Blackstone Publishing
Stealing the Countess
Summary
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 four-million dollars 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 12 years, is desperate to get it back and will pay out of his own pocket to do so. 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.
©2016 David Housewright (P)2021 Blackstone Publishing