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 one hundred 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.
Rushmore McKenzie has been shot and lies in a coma, while the police and his friends desperately try to find out what McKenzie was doing and who tried to kill him
Rushmore McKenzie, former St. Paul police detective and unexpected millionaire, does the occasional, unofficial private detective work-mostly favors for friends. He's faced kidnappers, domestic terrorists, art thieves, among others, and had a hand in solving some of the most perplexing mysteries of the Twin Cities. But this time, his prodigious luck and intuition may have finally failed him: he was shot in the back by an unknown assailant and lies in a coma.His childhood friend, Lt. Bobby Dunston of the St. Paul Police Department, assigns his best detective to the case while other figures-on both sides of the law-pursue the truth. What was he investigating, what did he learn that so threatened someone that they tried to kill him? What does a sketchy bar in the wrong part of town, the area's prominent tech millionaire family, drug dealers, investment bankers, and a mysterious woman who left an unknown package for McKenzie all have in common? The answer to that might be what stands between life and death.
Once a police detective in St. Paul, Minnesota, Rushmore McKenzie has become an unlikely millionaire and an occasional unlicensed private investigator, doing favors for friends. The favor, this time, is for a friend of a friend-Erin Peterson, a local business person and owner of a growing food company called Salsa Girl. Someone seems to have a beef with her: the outside locks on her factory having been systematically filled with superglue. But for some reason, Erin doesn't want to report this harassment to the police. As a favor to his poker buddy and hockey teammate Ian, McKenzie agrees to stop by and chat with Erin.
At first Erin denies there's anything going on and then, when the harassment escalates and threatens her business, she also asks for McKenzie's help. The further McKenzie digs into the situation, the more complicated-and deadly-it becomes. And somewhere, in the middle of it all, is Erin, playing all sides against the middle, leading McKenzie to wonder if you ever really know who your friends are.
Once a police detective in St. Paul, Minnesota, Rushmore McKenzie has become not only an unlikely millionaire, but an occasional unlicensed private investigator, doing favors for friends and people in need. When his stepdaughter Erica asks him for just such a favor, McKenzie doesn't have it in him to refuse. Even though it sounds like a very bad idea right from the start.
The father of Malcolm Harris, a college friend of Erica's, was found murdered a year ago in a park in New Brighton, a town just outside the Twin Cities. With no real clues and all the obvious suspects with concrete alibis, the case has long since gone cold. As McKenzie begins poking around, he soon discovers another unsolved murder that's tangentially related to this one. And all connections seem to lead back to a group of friends the victim was close with. But all McKenzie has is a series of odd, even suspicious, coincidences-until someone decides to make it all that more serious and personal.
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 $4 million 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 twelve 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.
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 thirty-seven 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.
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.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, along with his FBI pal Harry, make Rushmore McKenzie an offer he can't refuse-no matter how hard he tries: take on the identity of a wanted fugitive, escape to the upper reaches of Minnesota, and infiltrate a crew of armed robbers known as "The Iron Range Bandits." His mission: help retrieve a cache of stolen weapons before they're used to wreak havoc on the Canadian-US border.
But there are a few catches. First, the bandits aren't the hardcore criminals they seem to be, although the bent sheriff deputies chasing them certainly are. Then there is the stripper and her nefarious manager, the ex-soldier trying to prove he's a man, the minor-league crime czar who uses blackmail to force McKenzie to rob a highly guarded bank vault, and an enigmatic thug who finds love in all the wrong places. Not to mention the gunrunners who pride themselves on shooting first and asking questions later.
And if that's not enough to make him wonder why he didn't stay home with his lady love Nina Truhler, McKenzie soon learns that the promises of an ambitious assistant US attorney to the contrary, he is absolutely on his own.
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.
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.
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.
Rushmore McKenzie, a retired St. Paul policeman and unexpected millionaire, often works as an unlicensed PI, doing favors as it suits him. When graduate students Ivy Flynn and Josh Berglund show up with a story about $8 million in missing stolen gold from the '30s, McKenzie is intrigued.
In the early twentieth century, St. Paul, Minnesota, was an open city-a place where gangsters could come and stay unmolested by the local authorities. Frank "Jelly" Nash was suspected of masterminding a daring robbery of gold bars in 1933, but, before he could unload it, he was killed in the Kansas City Massacre. His gold, they believe, is still somewhere in St. Paul.
But they aren't the only ones looking. So are a couple of two-bit thugs, a woman named Heavenly, a local big-wig, and others. When Berglund is shot dead outside of Ivy's apartment, the treasure hunt turns unexpectedly deadly. McKenzie is looking for more than a legendary stash from seventy-five years ago, he's looking for a killer and the long-hidden truth behind Jelly's gold.
