Housewrong

David Housewright is one of several Minnesota-based authors writing in the detective/crime fiction arena, with the most famous being "Prey" series author John Sandford. He works with two lead characters -- his original series followed private investigator Holland Taylor for a handful of books before he introduced and ran with Rushmore McKenzie for several years. In 2018 he returned to Taylor and has since brought the total of that series to five books. The 17th McKenzie book is due in May. Housewright has a good ear for dialogue and a way with a smart-aleck quip that sometimes matches up with the legendary Robert B. Parker. His usual work is a solid three-to-four star effort and when he's really on, like with the McKenzie mystery Dead Boyfriends, he produces some of the detective genre's top modern work. But when he stinks...

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At the urging of his parents, Holland Taylor has taken the case of their elderly neighbor scammed out of her life savings, but the only problem is if he tries the usual ways of getting it back the chances he'll do so in time to do the victim any good are small. The con man has covered himself quite well. So Holland decides to try some shadier means, enlisting the help of a computer genius friend to play with the con-man's life and force him to return the money in 1998's Practice to Deceive.

The genius's abilities, though, mean Taylor has access to more than simple ring-the-doorbell-and-run pranks. He is able to make the grifter's wife, who didn't know about his activities, think her husband was having an affair. The con-man's real-world job in the financial sector is targeted too, with Taylor and his friend electronically trashing his reputation and reliability. He eventually gives in, but before he can get the money to Taylor he's killed -- it turns out that he was doing financial work with some rough folks as well. And before Taylor can find out who killed him, he becomes the target of the same kind of harassment he'd been dishing out.

Practice is only the second Holland Taylor book, and although Housewright smoothed out some of his first-novel wrinkles he makes the narratively fatal decision to have his lead character be an adolescent jerk. The professional tarring he and his computer friend lay on the shady financier is understandable, but when they give him the appearance of infidelity they bring harm to his innocent family. Taylor notes this in passing but it seems to have zero impact on his schemes. The solution to the mystery of who killed the con-man comes into the story like a shanked drive from another fairway and puts an end to what was already a pretty lousy outing for Holland Taylor and his cast.

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Rushmore McKenzie -- don't use his first name, please -- got very wealthy when he quit the police force, because he apprehended an embezzler and as a newly-minted private citizen he was able to keep the full reward from the insurance company. But he can't get away from helping people out now and again, especially when they need it and few others can provide it, as in 2008's Madman on a Drum.

Although his longtime friends Shelby and Bobby Dunston have the FBI on their side when their oldest daughter Victoria is kidnapped they also need McKenzie, because the kidnappers want money and the Dunstons are a law enforcement family of modest means. McKenzie has the money and agrees to deliver the ransom, but before the funds are assembled he does some digging to try to figure out who the kidnappers are. Some initial leads uncover some of the mystery but not all, so McKenzie must risk delivery of the ransom to get the little girl back.

For most of its length Drum ticks along fairly well as a gumshoe procedural as McKenzie and a parole officer try to track down an ex-con involved in the abduction. It begins to drag, though, as Housewright uses his story to preach a sermon about how hard prison time sometimes creates re-offenders rather than curbing them. It's not that the idea is untrue or that it couldn't be a good hanger for a detective story plot, it's that Housewright decides to shoehorn it in as lectures from different characters for paragraphs at a time, and then hit the reader over the head with it through the story resolution.

The finale manages to do two seemingly opposite things at once: Come out of nowhere yet be utterly unsurprising. Housewright generally tries to make his stories more mysteries than straight procedurals, with clues to a final denouement scattered through the story. But the preachy tone and clumsy endgame make this madman's Drum a bummer.