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TIN CITY
by David Housewright
St Martin's Minotaur, May 2005
288 pages
$23.95
ISBN: 0312321511


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

Cool! A new author that I like. I feel about David Housewright's TIN CITY somewhat the way I felt on first discovering talents like Donald Harstadt and Don Winslow; wondering where he'd been or I'd been. (And what's with me and male writers whose names start with D, all of a sudden?) This is an engaging story by a talented writer that offers an interesting, well-crafted and pretty likable protagonist. I'm game.

Mac (Rushmore's his real first name, shhhh) McKenzie is a sort of Travis McGee type; not a PI, not a cop, he "does favors for friends". He's an ex-cop, who doesn't need to work for a living; he received a $3m payment for hunting down an embezzler. Since I'm rather impatient with many amateur sleuths who never seem to worry about an steady income, this resolution of the problem, while not totally plausible, at least solves the often-ignored "how's he gonna pay for gas?" problem.

Mr Mosley is an old friend of Mac's father, a man he's known forever. Mosley asks for Mac's help with a seemingly trivial matter; his honeybees are dying. Except this is a friend, someone Mac owes a lot to and the honey is, well, it's a fairly sizable income for the guy. With Mac's connections in the community, he can find someone to investigate what's killing the bees. But when a student goes to take some samples to look for pesticide, she's threatened and shot at.

When Mosley and Mac go out to apologize, and find out what the heck is going on, they're threatened by an out-of-control man with a weapon. A short time later, after Mr Mosley decides to seek legal help against the threat and the racism, things escalate appallingly; soon, the old man is dead, and a woman has been raped. This is way more than someone angry over trespassing. And you don't do that to McKenzie's friends.

As an ex-cop, and a good one, Mac still has friends in law enforcement and on the other side. But things get weird, the case is taken away from the competent cop and given to a jerk who can't even be bothered to preserve evidence for fingerprinting a man who took a shot at Mac. The next thing he knows, the FBI's issued an order to pick him up.

Mac uses his contacts to disappear for awhile, because nothing about this makes sense. And he soon comes to realize that the FBI is possibly providing protection for the wrong people and one thing's clear -- he can't trust too many people.

Housewright's done a really nice job with the people in his story. They're not cookie cutter, they've got depth and real, at times sweet, at times bittersweet, relationships -- wow, friendship, cool! I like what he shows us about McKenzie. The setting -- the Twin Cities -- is done in mystery but hardly overdone and the plot is pretty good too. And there's a lovely joke hidden in the name of one of the characters that I simply must track down. All in all, an author to keep an eye on.

Reviewed by Andi Shechter, May 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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