The Last Kind Word

Starred review from April 29, 2013
Outstanding ingenuity and empathy mark Edgar-winner Housewright’s 10th mystery featuring millionaire St. Paul, Minn., ex-cop Rushmore McKenzie (after 2012’s Curse of the Jade Lilly). As part of an ATF operation to recover stolen guns from the notoriously botched real-life Operation Fast and Furious, McKenzie successfully infiltrates the inept Iron Range Bandits, made up of an extended family that has drifted into armed robbery because of economic hard times. The only way to discover the source of their weapons is to plan a major heist—except that McKenzie finds himself caring about the sad-sack family members and doesn’t want to involve them in more criminal activity. But crooked cops and a creepily malevolent local crime boss insist that the robbery proceed so that they can split the loot. Tension builds as the action accelerates. Quirkily sympathetic characters make this more than a clever caper novel; Virgil Flowers and Lucas Davenport no longer have northern Minnesota all to themselves. Agent: Alison Pickard, Alison J. Picard Agency.

May 1, 2013

McKenzie knows that his posing as an undercover agent for the ATF won't go smoothly when the authorities need his help with a gunrunning case. The resourceful detective figures it out in his tenth episode (after Curse of the Jade Lily).

Copyright 2013 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 1, 2013
Here's the ninth Rushmore McKenzie novel. For series fans, that's all that needs to be said, but newcomers might need a bit more information. Rushmore was a detective in St. Paul, Minnesota, before he resigned from the police department so he could collect a seven-figure reward for busting a major embezzler. Now independently wealthy, he's a sort of crimesolver-for-hire. Here Rushmore is recruited by the ATF to infiltrate a gang of gunrunners, a plan that seems dicey to start with and positively suicidal once he's in too deep to extricate himself without somebody noticing. If you took a modern-day noir and mixed it with a light comedy, you'd get something very much like a McKenzie novel: a serious, occasionally dark story told by an entertaining, often bemused narrator. Housewright just throws us into the story, too, filling us in on the background only after we've become convinced Rushmore might have lost his way. An excellent but strangely underappreciated series.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)