Rushmore
McKenzie, created by David Housewright, is one of my favorite fictional
characters. Pleasantly self-indulgent and not especially energetic, he is still
willing to do favors for his friends, as well as for friends of friends, which
is often how he gets into situations where his ribs are cracked and the police
are asking him awkward questions.
In Dead
Man’s Mistress (Minotaur, 2019), the 16th of Mac’s adventures,
the director of a local museum whom he helped in the past asks Mac to help a
friend locate some paintings that have been stolen. Mac of course can’t say no,
especially when he learns that it’s not just any friend, it’s Louise Wyckoff,
the reclusive yet famous subject of dozens of paintings by the world-famous
artist Randolph McInnis.
The discovery
of the paintings with Louise came as a shock to the world and to McInnis’s wife
after McInnis’s death in a traffic accident. Think back to the furor over
Wyeth’s paintings of Helga. There was much speculation as to the exact
relationship between McInnis and the much younger Louise, which Louise has
steadfastly declined to explain. Now, some 35 years after his death, Louise
reveals that McInnis gave her three paintings, previously unknown to exist and
worth millions, and that someone has stolen them from her house in Grand
Marais, Minnesota.
Louise
teaches art in her home, and any number of people have reason to be there. Mac
starts checking into all her visitors to identify the likely candidates for
theft and almost immediately the name of David Montgomery, a handyman who was
in Louise’s house multiple times during the week in question, pops up. When Mac
goes to Montgomery’s house to interview him, Mac finds Montgomery shot to death
in what could be a suicide but maybe not. The local police are interested in
Mac, since he found the body, and also are not especially happy to learn he’s
carrying out an investigation on their turf of a major theft they didn’t know
about.
Mac manages
to placate the police and goes about his inquiries, managing to incur the ire
of some local thugs who follow him across the border into Canada. Fisticuffs
and gunfire take place, and the hoodlums are taken into a custody in a country
other than their own. The ensuing quick tutorial in the gun laws of Canada was
fascinating.
Of course
it’s all more complicated than that, as usual in this series. Another fine
entry, with the next one to be released in July 2020. One point against it: The
typos in the book jerked me out of the story more than once. “Publicaly”?
“Indentify”? Come on, Minotaur, you’re falling down on the job.
·
Hardcover: 320 pages
·
Publisher: Minotaur
Books (May 21, 2019)
·
Language: English
·
ISBN-10: 1250212154
·
ISBN-13: 978-1250212153
Aubrey Hamilton ©2020
Aubrey Hamilton is a former librarian who works on Federal It
projects by day and reads mysteries at night.
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