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. 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 "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 David Housewright has worked as a journalist covering both crime and sports (sometimes simultaneously), an advertising copywriter and creative director, and a writing instructor. He won the Edgar Award for his first novel, Penance , in 1996, and the Minnesota Book Award for his second, Practice to Deceive , in 1998. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.   1Stacy Carlson was nine years old and she was dying. Her parents told me so while I watched her playing happily on the front lawn of their home, and the news hit me so hard I nearly lost my breath.“Does she know?”“We haven’t told her,” Molly Carlson said. “But, yes, I think she knows. We took her to enough doctors, even took her to the Mayo Clinic.”“What did the doctors tell you?”“Leukemia,” Richard Carlson answered from across the living room, answered as if he wished to spare his wife the pain of speaking the word. “They say her body is producing too many white blood corpuscles. They say her spleen and lymph glands are enlarged. They say she needs a bone marrow transplant or she’ll die. Only, neither of us is compatible and finding a donor outside the family, that’s a twenty thousand to one shot. Leastwise, that’s what they say.”Carlson was a big man, big in every direction, 275 at least and not all of it was fat. His eyes were a pale green and what little hair he had was gray. All the other times I had seen him he had worn the faded jeans and T-shirts of a working contractor—a guy who not only designed and sold lake homes, but who also dug foundations and hammered nails. Today he was wearing his Sunday best: black boots, designer jeans, a checkered shirt with imitation pearl snaps, and a belt with a garish buckle declaring his fidelity to Winston Cup racing. He lived in a three-story house that he had built himself in a neighborhood where all the other houses were close to the ground. Somehow he had managed to build it without uprooting the dozen magnificent oak, maple, and birch trees that surrounded it. It was because of the house and trees that I had hired Carlson to build my own lake home.“You want me to find a donor for Stacy?” I asked.“We want you to find our other daughter, Jamie,” Carlson said.“Jamie,” repeated Mrs. Carlson. Her voice was soft, almost a whisper. She was wearing a powder-blue dress