Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)This is the second book in a new series focused on Rushmore "Mac" McKenzie, who used to be a St. Paul policeman, but retired after collecting a $3 million bounty on an embezzler. Now, he does the occasional "favor" for his friends and otherwise takes it pretty easy. At the start of _Tin City_, Mac gets a call from Mr. Mosley, an old friend of his father's, who is a beekeeper and wants Mac's help figuring out why an unusually large number of his bees have been dying off lately. Mac calls in a favor from a friend in the entomology department at the University of Minnesota and it's not too long before the friend's graduate teaching assistant has tracked down the source of a pesticide being sprayed on a neighboring property, which is drifting over to Mosley's hives and killing his bees. When the teaching assistant calls in and reports being shot at, Mac and Mosley hurriedly drive to the scene to offer their assistance. At the scene, they're confonted by a man holding a shotgun and telling them they're trespassing. They leave, only to involve one of Mac's other friends, a lawyer, by having him send a threatening letter to the property's owner. From there, events suddenly turn violent--Mosley is killed and the lawyer's wife is assaulted, leaving Mac a very angry man who must get to the bottom of things and track down the man responsible.
This was an excellent book, with its settings and locations around the Twin Cities brought to convincing life. Much of the story takes place in a tiny municipality called Hilltop, the "tin city" of the title, which is an actual place, a city of mobile homes completely surrounded by the larger city of Columbia Heights. Mac pretends to be a writer for _Trailer Life_ magazine and interviews several of the residents, allowing Housewright to include some fascinating historical details about this real place (I checked my Twin Cities street atlas just to make sure, and sure enough, there is a Hilltop, right where Housewright says it is). Along the way, Mac falls in love with Penelope Glass, a song writer and the neglected wife of a rogue FBI agent. The scenes describing their conversations and a dinner they have together have a real sweetness to them. Mac finds himself in the middle of a complicated mess, involving a mobster on the run from a botched assassination attempt in New York and a couple of local gangster wanna-be's, and things are complicated further when the FBI agent places a locate and detain order for him, requiring Mac to go underground.
Mac's an appealing character, with lots of friends in high and low places. His loyalty to his friends and willingness to do what it takes to make things right, as well as his thoughts on his deceased father and the hand Mr. Mosley had in bringing him up to be a "good guy," and the uncertainty he feels when he gets some measure of vengeance, make him a pretty complicated character. _Tin City_ is an excellent follow-up to the very strong _A Hard Ticket Home_ and, hopefully, there will be many more "Mac" McKenzie novels to follow. Highly recommended.
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