David Housewright, A Hard Ticket Home

A Hard Ticket Home

David Housewright

St. Martin's May 2004, $23.95, 288 pp.

ISBN 031332149x

After almost a dozen years on the St. Paul Police force, Rushmore McKenzie knows he has no chance of promotion ever since he made a righteous killing using a gun that was not standard police issue. When he finds an embezzler and the money he stole, he quits the force. This makes him eligible to take the insurance company reward for the return of the money. He is now a wealthy unlicensed private eye taking cases that interest him.

Richard and Molly Carlson ask him to find their daughter Jamie who left years ago and never returned. Their younger daughter Stacy is dying of leukemia and her only hope is a bone marrow transplant. After a thorough search he locates Jamie who tells him she will get in touch with him after she tells her husband about the family he never knew she had. When he doesn't hear from her, he goes to her home only to find her murdered. Her husband and son are missing, but Jamie's parents want him to locate their grandson who might be a match for Stacy. The investigation turns deadlier when eight men connected to the case are murdered, some by McKenzie's hand.

The case off as a missing person's case but turns into a conspiracy linking a business group with a low profile gang armed with East European weapons. David Housewright has written an exciting, action packed crime thriller in which it is difficult to tell the good people from the bad. A HOT TICKET HOME is a dark urban thriller that will have readers wondering what lurks behind the masks certain people wear to cover the evil that resides within.

Harriet Klausner