Review: "A Hard Ticket Home" by David Housewright

 

A Hard Ticket Home by David Housewright Minotaur Books, 2004   David Housewright’s first Rushmore McKenzie, A Hard Ticket Home, had escaped my reading eye until now. Before turning its first page, I had read eleven of the 22 books in the series so far and it was fun to see how McKenzie has changed from his first outing to the latest. One thing I noticed—many of McKenzie’s friends, including his best pal Bobby Dunston, call him, “Mac,” which isn’t the case as the series goes on. Another is, McKenzie is moodier in this first story than any of the others I’ve read. Of course he kills a few people and another is killed because of his snooping. But for the most part McKenzie is the same dented and likable hero as he has always been. A Hard Ticket Home opens with a telling of how a St. Paul beat cop, McKenzie, became a millionaire, and it was fun to have the nitty gritty of his future wealth spelled out. But the real meat of the story is about McKenzie’s search for Jamie Carlson. Seven years earlier, Jamie went missing from her parents’ Grand Rapids, Minnesota, home. Her parents—Jamie’s father built a deck for McKenzie’s lake house, which is how they’re acquainted—didn’t search for Jamie when she disappeared but now their younger daughter, Stacy, has leukemia and they are hoping Jamie is a match as a bone marrow donor. McKenzie tracks Jamie down without difficulty, which is when his (and Jamie’s) trouble begins. That trouble takes McKenzie inside a ruthless street gang, onto the guest list of an elite group of entrepreneurs, and turns him into a play thing of the FBI and ATF. A Hard Ticket Home’s Minnesota is less finely detailed than in the future books, but even so, the setting is nicely rendered. It is good fun to watch McKenzie and his series long paramour, Nina Truhler, meet in Nina’s jazz club, Rikkie’s, for the first time. The action, and as one expects from McKenzie there is a bunch, is top-notch and exciting. There are shootings, fisticuffs—including one that nearly kills McKenzie—and even an explosion. The mystery is fine-tuned with more than a couple twists, including a marvelous one near the end. Even better, McKenzie is his usual flawed, smart-alecky, and likable as hell self.

Find A Hard Ticket Home on Amazon—click here for the Kindle edition and here for the paperback.