Private Cities

Rushmore McKenzie is a former cop, current millionaire, and an occasional unlicensed PI who does favors for friends. Yet he has reservations when his girlfriend’s daughter asks him to help her father, a man in serious trouble. En route from St. Paul to a Canadian blues festival on Highway 61, he met a girl, blacked out, and awoke hours later in a strange motel, with the girl’s murdered body on the floor. Slipping away unnoticed and heading home, he thought he’d got away - until he started getting texts with photos of the body and demands for blackmail payments he couldn’t pay.

A missing girl. A shell-shocked soldier. A wife stepping out on her husband. Two women beaten to death. A sinister sabotage plot. A wounded, relentless private eye who will stop at nothing to protect those he loves. Picking up right at the thrilling conclusion of "The Big Bout," "The Big Blast" finds Soldier working three new complex cases and taking care of his friends in wartime Panama City. History. Mystery. Romance. Action. Thrills. Suspense. Noir. “Michael Lister writes some of the best hard-boiled prose going. Nothing short of amazing!” Booklist Starred Review. “Lister’s hard-...

Since becoming an unlikely millionaire and quitting the St. Paul Police Department, Rushmore McKenzie has been working as an unlicensed private investigator. But even for him, this latest job is unusual. He’s been asked to find a stolen Stradivarius, known as the Countess Borromeo, that only the violinist seems to want him to find. It was stolen from a locked room in a B&B in the violinist’s former hometown of Bayfield, Wisconsin. For McKenzie, helping means going against the local police, the insurance company, the FBI’s Art Crime division, and his own lawyer’s advice.

Homicide cop Bobby Dunston’s daughter has been kidnapped, taken in broad daylight on a city street in the middle of September. The kidnappers demand a million dollars and force Dunston to get the ransom from his friend McKenzie. It soon becomes apparent to the two of them that one of the kidnappers is childhood pal Scottie, a once aspiring drummer now gone astray, and that the kidnapping is payback for “crimes” committed in their past.

He’s baaack! Robert Samuel Johnson, aka The Trench Coat Rapist, returns to the Motor City to terrorize Dalen Reese, his daughter Olivia, his partner and friend Ian Parker, as well as the hobbled retired detective Robert Stonewall. After Johnson’s release from Jackson State Penitentiary last year, Robert Stonewall believed he had rid Detroit of the man that had terrorized the city once and for all. But Johnson’s return has the partners of The Parker and Reese Private Investigative Agency once again trying to stop the madman before he strikes again. Along the way, Dalen and Ian are ...

Right up until they put him in jail, McKenzie thought the cops were kidding. After all, he did them a favor by stopping a rookie cop from roughing up a distraught woman at a murder scene. But the next thing he knows, he’s in jail, missing an important date with his girlfriend and reliving nightmares he thought he had left far behind him - and vowing payback for all of it. If that means sticking his nose into an ongoing murder investigation, well, he’s done it before.

Chicago, 1928. In the stifling summer heat, three disturbing events take place: a clique of city leaders is poisoned, a white gangster is found mutilated and a famous heiress vanishes without a trace. Detectives Michael Talbot and Ida Davis are hired to find the missing heiress, but it proves harder than expected, and so Ida must elicit the help of her friend Louis Armstrong. But will any of them find the answers they need in the capital of jazz, booze and corruption?

Pete Fernandez is a mess. He’s on the brink of being fired from his middle-management newspaper job. His fiancée has up and left him. Now, after the sudden death of his father, he’s back in his hometown of Miami, slowly drinking himself into oblivion. But when a coworker he barely knows asks Pete to locate a missing daughter, Pete finds himself dragged into a tale of murder, drugs, double-crosses, and memories bursting from the black heart of the Miami underworld - and, shockingly, his father’s past.

As an amateur PI with a bent moral compass, Ash McKenna is good at finding people - but not at staying out of trouble. Between his own violent tendencies, the shadow cast by his father's death, and a self-destructive revenge quest, he made a mess of his life in NYC. Figuring it was time for a change of scenery Ash relocated to Portland, taking a job as a bouncer in a vegan strip club. And he hasn't had to hit anyone in six months. So when one of the club's dancers asks Ash for help finding her daughter, he declines, content to keep the darkness in his past.

When the ATF gets a lead on a much-sought-after cache of illegal guns near the Canadian border, they call millionaire private detective Rushmore McKenzie in to help them track down the gunrunners. Their only lead is a guy who is part of a small-time gang of armed robbers working north of the Twin Cities. Their idea is for McKenzie to infiltrate the group and wait for them to lead him to the guns. Which seemed like a bad idea to McKenzie at the time, but even he had no idea just how bad things were going to get.

Rushmore McKenzie, former St. Paul police detective and unexpected millionaire, does the occasional, unofficial private detective work - mostly favors for friends. He’s faced kidnappers, domestic terrorists, art thieves, among others, and had a hand in solving some of the most perplexing mysteries of the Twin Cities. But this time, his prodigious luck and intuition may have finally failed him: He was shot in the back by an unknown assailant and lies in a coma.

Great War veteran and rising star Gene Hammons lost his job as a homicide detective when he tried to prove that a woman was wrongly convicted of murder to protect a well-connected man. Now a private investigator, Hammons makes his living looking for missing persons - a plentiful caseload during the Great Depression, when people seem to disappear all the time. But his routine is disrupted when his brother - another homicide detective, still on the force - enlists his help looking into the death of a young woman whose dismembered body is found beside the railroad tracks.

Rushmore McKenzie, a retired St. Paul policeman and unexpected millionaire, often works as an unlicensed PI, doing favors as it suits him. When two graduate students show up with a story about $8 million in missing stolen gold from the ’30s, McKenzie is intrigued. In the early 20th century, St. Paul, Minnesota, was an open city - a place where gangsters could stay unmolested by the local authorities. Frank “Jelly” Nash was suspected of masterminding a daring robbery of gold bars in 1933, but, before he could unload it, he was killed in the Kansas City Massacre.

During one of the first heavy snows of the winter, on the interstate outside the Twin Cities, Rushmore McKenzie is behind a truck behaving erratically when the man in the truck bed dumps a body out onto the road, right in front of McKenzie’s car. McKenzie avoids hitting the body, a bound woman who is just barely alive, but his stopped car in the middle of the road starts a chain of accidents, resulting in a 37-car pile-up. By the time the police arrive, and the EMTs and ambulances have taken care of the immediate injuries, the truck is long gone.

A whole lotta shakin’ is going on in the quirky and page-turning mystery series featuring Jack McCoul, an ex-con artist who solves murders. “Loaded with one liners. Keeps the plot turning.” — Kirkus Reviews As earthquakes threaten California, recovering con artist Jack McCoul must dodge killers and turn the tables on a gang of greedy developers and crooked politicians who will stop at nothing to sell the heart and soul of San Francisco to the highest bidder. Read as a standalone or as part of the series. What readers are saying: ★★★★★ The characters are delicious. The ...

Private Investigator Gideon Rimes knows he’s lucky, a survivor over the years. Now months after the first anniversary of the pandemic, a sense of mortality lingers over Nickel City. The changed landscape includes word of crime lord Lorenzo Quick’s passing whose regime is imploding as a Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act case is being avidly built by the ADA. Yet in the territorial vacuum, opportunistic and unpredictable successors emerge. The case takes a twist when a drive-by shooting at an outdoor concert shares a link and jeopardizes Rimes’s personal world.

When a priest is brutally gunned down in front of St. Jerome's Chinese-American Catholic Church, Father Luis Chavez is asked by the archdiocese to lead an inquiry. With the confessed killer already in custody, it looks like an open-and-shut case. That is, until Father Chavez digs deeper. As the killer's confession unravels, Father Chavez teams up with Deputy District Attorney Michael Story to get to the bottom of it. Together, they discover a conspiracy leading back to one of the world's oldest criminal organizations.

Duke Dempsey is a private investigator in 1938 Charleston, SC. He is thrust into the case of a lifetime when the Vatican comes calling and hires him to find an invaluable relic. Charleston is also hit with the mysterious murders of a prominent priest of St. Patrick's Cathedral and a local cop. Duke is forced into a partnership with the presiding detective, Johnny Stampkin, to find the relic and solve the murders. The case takes a multitude of twists and turns as they navigate through Roman Catholic puzzles, Civil War secrets, and a Nazi assassin.

Private investigator Gideon Rimes, a black Iraq War vet and a retired Army CID detective, thought he’d left behind the danger of the battlefield. He serves subpoenas, finds witnesses, and provides background checks for better pay and little use of his trusty Glock. But then he’s hired to protect sultry, young blues singer Indigo Waters from her stalker ex-boyfriend - a hotheaded cop who also serves as a driver and bodyguard for the Buffalo mayor.

When a twin-engine Beechcraft crashes into one of Richmond’s watering holes and turns happy hour into Hell, theories run rampant. Was it terrorists who, for some reason, decided to vent their spleens on unsuspecting Richmond? Was it a statement by homegrown killers less-than-thrilled that the city still, in the 21st century, chooses to honor Confederate leaders on its most prominent avenue? The obvious answers, though, just don’t pan out. Hard-charging reporter Willie Black’s search for the truth eventually leads him to a small town on the Chesapeake....