Looking For a Good Book

Former St. Paul police detective, Rushmore McKenzie, is on a weekend getaway with his wife and a group of friends, including Bobby Dunston, a current police detective. They are in northern Wisconsin having drinks at a local winery when a man carrying an AR-15 walks onto the winery property and starts to point his weapon at all the people on the patio. McKenzie and Dunston react the way you hope police would – rushing the man and disarming him just as a burst of shots fire harmlessly into the sky.

The local sheriff applauds the quick action of the two men, but the local DA and judge remind the men that Wisconsin is an open-carry state and since he hadn’t fired his weapon, he had every right to carry it onto the business and they the two men could (and perhaps should) be arrested for assault.

The sheriff, being busy enough with other work and in just a little over her head, asks McKenzie to help do some investigating – why was the man sent there (as determined by a text on his phone) and who was he meant to shoot? The investigation takes a dark turn when the AR-15-carrying man is killed and McKenzie is arrested for the murder.

I read a lot of books (100-200 per year) so I don’t always remember the details of every book. Even books/authors/series that I really enjoy – I may not remember some of the finer details. I say this because I really have come to like the Rushmore ‘Mac’ McKenzie novels. This is the 8th book in the series that I’ve read and it’s the 23rd in the series. … And something struck me as quite odd….

I don’t remember McKenzie having so pronounced an internal monologue. It started very early, in the first few pages, when someone mentioned that the incident happened so fast that they didn’t know what was happening or if it was even real.

“Yeah, a lot of eyewitnesses are like that” McKenzie’s inner voice says. And when one of the witnesses says that he felt the gun was pointed right at him, that inner voice says, “”That should strengthen the sheriff’s case.” Though at the time he had no reason to think it needed strengthening.

Sometimes that inner voice really goes on.

Refusing to answer questions is smart, my inner voice told me. You wouldn’t do that, either. But refusing to contact an attorney – does he believe someone will come riding to his rescue? 

I’m not going to list them all, but suffice it to say that I don’t remember McKenzie talking to himself this way, this much, and I think I would remember because I found it distracting. I actually wondered if this book was ghost-written by someone else. The most awkward moment to read of the inner voice’s talking was near the end when McKenzie, as the first person narrator of the book notes:

Kressler hesitated as if she was searching for the perfect word. Sheriff Caine supplied it for her.

Unsubstantiated conjecture,” she said.

And the inner voice tells McKenzie: Actually, that’s two words. Since he’s a First Person narrator, did we need the voice correcting him? Couldn’t he have just said that on his own?

As you might expect in a detective mystery, McKenzie digs into the backgrounds of all the people who were at the winery and might be either the targets, or the person behind the text sending the shooter to the winery. These people turned out to be quite interesting.   From unlikely millionaires to swingers, we get some characters who are fun to read about.

The mystery was interesting with the appropriate red herrings, but some of the side stories got wrapped up a little too easily for me.

I’ve been a fan of author David Housewright and the Mac McKenzie books I’ve read, but this is my least favorite because it didn’t feel like a Mac McKenzie novel. It felt like an imposter. But maybe I’m just not remembering the McKenzie books – it’s been ten months and 100+ books since I last read one, after all.

Looking for a good book? Fear the Reaper is the 23rd book in the Mac McKenzie series by David Housewright. McKenzie seems to be talking to himself a bit more, but he’s still got some serious investigative skills and puts them to good use.

I received a digital copy of this book from the publisher, through Netgalley, in exchange for an honest review.

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Fear the Reaper

author: David Housewright

series: Mac McKenzie #23

publisher: Minotaur Books

ISBN:  9781250360489

hardcover, 320 pages