I received this ARC from Netgalley and St. Martin’s Press in exchange for an honest review.

Rushmore “Mac” McKenzie is a detective, sort of.  After leaving the St. Paul police force in order to accept a reward for catching an embezzler, he finds himself rich and relatively idle.  Deciding to channel that boredom into “favors” for friends and friends of friends as an unlicensed detective, I get the feeling that his life is more exciting as a civilian.

This is a series and I was able to follow along without having read the first 13 books, which is always nice.  Housewright does a good job of supplying supplementary information in such a way that one unfamiliar with the series will still be able to understand.

I consider this to be the perfect sort of book to take along on a long-haul flight across the world, something I am very familiar with (I’ll be downloading the first few for my transatlantic flights this summer).  Mac’s girlfriend’s daughter implores him to find out what happened to her friend’s father.  He was murdered before the book begins and the police have no leads.  The game is afoot!

I believed in momentum.  I believed that if you keep moving, peeking under beds, peeping over fences, turning over rocks, there’s a better chance of accidents happening, some good, some bad; of the fortuitous unearthing of the odd puzzle piece in the most unlikely nook or cranny.

This is a truly interesting detective mystery.  Perhaps my favorite part was all of the Twin Cities love embedded in it.  No, I’m not from the Twin Cities, nor even the midwest.  I simply love when an author shows hometown pride.  I felt like I was there, from the descriptions of local venues to the complaints about traffic bottlenecks.  Mac is a good man, with a set of skills that he puts to good use.  Will the mystery be solved?  Read and find out.

Now the big question—why do you still care?  Good question.  I felt a little like a historian working a Rubik’s Cube, twisting the sides this way and that until it gave me a clear picture of what happened at such and such a time in such and such a place–but to what purpose?

4 stars.

Expected Publication: June 6, 2017