Product Description

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 rising stars.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #317299 in Books
• Published on: 2006-02-28
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 326 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780843956818
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

From Publishers Weekly
Housewright's first mystery series (for which he won an Edgar) about Holland Taylor, a former St. Paul cop who became a smart-talking private eye, trickled out after three books. His new series is about Rushmore McKenzie, a former St. Paul cop who becomes a smart-talking (albeit unlicensed) private eye. What makes them different? Not all that much. The earlier series was perhaps a bit harder-edged: Taylor left the force after he was accused of murdering the drunk driver who killed his wife and child, while McKenzie's motives for going private involve a sudden cash windfall when he captures a wanted swindler. And many chuckles are generated by McKenzie's first name (he was conceived on a trip to Mt. Rushmore), which is why he prefers to be called Mac. But basically McKenzie is the same kind of genial doofus his predecessor was, a true son of Spenser who tells us in great detail about every Pig's Eye beer he drinks and every opera record he plays. The author has a sharp, bouncy prose style, and his story—about Mac's search for a friend's long-missing daughter who can possibly be a bone marrow donor for her younger sister—has some touching and exciting moments. But Housewright has been shopping for interesting character traits at the same store for too long, and there's nothing here to show that a series about McKenzie will be any different—or any more successful—than the one about Taylor.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
In a captivating opening sequence, St. Paul cop Rushmore McKenzie comes into some unexpected income, allowing him to retire from the force and leave the mean streets for a kinder, gentler tax bracket. But when the pro bono search for a runaway who may be a viable donor for her ailing little sister turns grisly, he brashly tangles with a savage serial killer and some nasty gangsters with unlimited ordnance. As Housewright churns the action, enlarging on Raymond Chandler's advice to "bring on a man with a gun," his hero is stretched a little thin between the decent fellow who feeds ducks and muses on his deceased dad's advice and the reckless vigilante with a taste for revenge--a lack of focus not offset by McKenzie's tiresome tendency to share his musical tastes at every turn. Still, many readers will find him more sympathetic than the lead of the author's Holland Taylor books, with enough of Travis McGee's stoic charm to make this a series worth watching. A good buy for larger mystery collections. David Wright
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"I didn't so much read Hard Ticket Home as inhale it. What a wonderful time I had. "
- Nevada Barr, author of Hunting Season

"David Housewright has written a stunning novel. His prose is bone hard and beautiful, his story brutally dark, undeniably compelling, and in odd, unpredictable moments, quite funny."
- William Kent Krueger, author of Blood Hollow
-- Review

Customer Reviews

Author Should be HouseHold Name
As others have mentioned, this author should get more press and marketing than he does. His stories are different in such a good way. His characterizations are real, his sense of humor is tops and his stories have diversity. I would also like to thank Amazon for introducing me to this author. I liked the Holland Taylor stories and would like to see him trade off between the two. I would recommend reading just one of his books and you will be hooked...

Better than much of what's out there
I have been impressed with David Housewright's writing since his debut novel, Penance, appeared some years ago. From what I've heard elsewhere, I was one of the few who liked it, but that sort of thing has never bothered me in the past. He had one character there, an ex-cop named Holland Taylor, and he's started a second character here, another ex-cop named Rushmore "Mac" Mackenzie. Mac's a regular sort of guy, except that while a cop he managed to find an embezzler everyone else was looking for, and collect the reward for being the guy who tracked the fugitive down. This led to his being on the outs with his police department, so he quit. Now he occasionally helps people in trouble, though of course he's not a licensed investigator or anything.

In the current book, he's hired to find a woman who ran away from her parents just after she turned 18. They haven't seen her since, and her younger sister has developed leukemia. Neither of the parents are acceptable donors, but a daughter might be, so off Mac goes, looking for her. Soon, people are shooting at him, women coming on to him, and the dead bodies and confusing plot twists are piling up.

This is a very good mystery, perhaps Housewright's best. The plot's logical and everything connects. The suspects are all believable, the crimes are things that at least could happen, and the solution to everything is satisfying. I would recommend this book.

dark urban thriller
After almost a dozen years on the St. Paul Police force, Rushmore McKenzie knows he has no chance of promotion ever since he made a righteous killing using a gun that was not standard police issue. When he finds an embezzler and the money he stole, he quits the force. This makes him eligible to take the insurance company reward for the return of the money. He is now a wealthy unlicensed private eye taking cases that interest him.

Richard and Molly Carlson ask him to find their daughter Jamie who left years ago and never returned. Their younger daughter Stacy is dying of leukemia and her only hope is a bone marrow transplant. After a thorough search he locates Jamie who tells him she will get in touch with him after she tells her husband about the family he never knew she had. When he doesn't hear from her, he goes to her home only to find her murdered. Her husband and son are missing, but Jamie's parents want him to locate their grandson who might be a match for Stacy. The investigation turns deadlier when eight men connected to the case are murdered, some by McKenzie's hand.

The case off as a missing person's case but turns into a conspiracy linking a business group with a low profile gang armed with East European weapons. David Housewright has written an exciting, action packed crime thriller in which it is difficult to tell the good people from the bad. A HOT TICKET HOME is a dark urban thriller that will have readers wondering what lurks behind the masks certain people wear to cover the evil that resides within.

Harriet Klausner