Love that these books take place in Minnesota. ( )

McKenzie is asked by Nina's daughter, Erica, to help out her father who is being blackmailed (only Erica does not know why her father needs help).

Erica's father & Nina's ex is a conman being conned by a young prostitute he met online. He took her to a Jazz Festival in Thunder Bay, Canada... The last thing he remembers is they were drinking & getting high and then he wakes up to find her dead, throat slit, on a different hotel floor than where they were staying and instead of checking for a pulse, he bolts without reporting the crime to the police.

While investigating the hotel room, McKenzie's car is tagged by the "Two Joes" with a large amount of cocaine, which McKenzie finds and disposes of.

Turns out Erica's father is being blackmailed for the death of the prostitute and has set McKenzie up as a mule for the drugs w/ the two Joes.

When McKenzie finds out the girl is still alive it leads to a hunt for her & the database she stole from the online Madame by several killers working for different factions all with different interests....

All throughout the story as the many layers of deceit of Erica's schmucky father become revealed, it is evident why Nina divorced him, leaving one to wonder why McKenzie continues to help him.

Intense, fast paced & an engrossing read; however, as I'm beginning to like the characters in this series less & less, which is why this gets 3 stars ( )

Good fast detective novel. Minnesota writer. ( )

Rushmore McKenzie is sweet talked by his girlfriend's daughter, Erica, into helping her father, Jason Truhler, who is being blackmailed by persons unknown. Someone has photographs of Jason lying unconscious in bed; nearby, a young girl, with her throat slashed, lies in a spreading pool of blood. McKenzie travels on Highway 61 from the Twin Cities to the Chalet Motel in Thunder Bay, Ontario, where the girl was stabbed. Jason is an unscrupulous pedophile who can't be trusted and McKenzie soon finds himself ensnared in a complex web involving drug trafficking, arson and internet prostitution. At the center of this web is a nineteen-year-old prostitute who has information for which everyone is willing to kill in order to obtain.

I started out liking this book more than 3 stars. Toward the end there was way too much discussion about who should shoot who amd why they should or shouldn't and entirely too much lying by eveyone. The story became bogged down in useless dialog. Overall, it had the beginnings of a great storyline and I do intend to read more of this authors work. ( )

One of the reasons I read (and write) crime novels is to experience danger without suffering any of the consequences. Call it what you will. Escapism. Wish fulfillment. Fantasy. But whatever label you want to put on it, I would argue it is a healthy way to indulge, and David Housewright’s PI novel Highway 61 is one thoroughly satisfying indulgence, a book totally worthy of adverbs.

In Highway 61, Rushmore McKenzie (great name!) is a recent millionaire and unlicensed PI who does favors for his friends, or in this case, the daughter of the woman he loves. The daughter’s father, a lowlife with a taste for barely legal girls named Jason Truhler, is being blackmailed. It doesn’t take McKenzie very long before he figures out Truhler has fallen victim to the classic Honey Pot scam. A bit more digging and all manner of unsavory characters come crawling out of the dirt: a pair of murderous brothers referred to as the Joes, a serial arsonist named Bug, a Machiavellian fixer called Muehlenhaus, and a teenage callgirl-come-blackmailer named Vicki Walsh at the center of it all. With a sordid cast of characters like that, the action is bound to reach a fever pitch, and in a hurry, which it does.

Aside from the requisite car chases and physical confrontations between McKenzie and the bad guys, all of which are expertly written and kept me up past my bedtime, this novel does something quite interesting: it uses Highway 61 as both a setting for the action and as a metaphor. The highway represents moral decay, and McKenzie must traverse this highway and save the day, all while maintaining his own moral compass. Pretty deep stuff, especially for such a fun read.

This was my first encounter with Rushmore McKenzie, but it won’t be my last. I’m planning my own trip down the highway soon. . .to pick up another of Housewright’s novels. Hopefully, I won’t come across any blackmailers or armed assailants as I prefer to keep my fantasy life separate from my real one. ( )