Rushmore "Mac" McKenzie's past comes back to haunt him, perhaps literally, in Edgar winner Housewright's fun, fast-moving 17th outing for the onetime St. Paul, Minn., cop turned unlicensed detective (after 2019's Dead Man's Mistress). During a lecture, a psychic medium channels a dark presence who talks about a large sum of money and repeats the name McKenzie. The presence calls for McKenzie's death before it will reveal the location of the money. A friend in the audience later relays all this to Mac, who thinks the presence, if it exists, is Leland Hayes, a criminal Mac shot dead 25 years earlier in the aftermath of a bank robbery, from which the money was never recovered. Mac is soon caught up in the world of psychics, not so reality TV, and very real physical threats by those seeking the lost treasure. The appealing Mac and his cohorts engage in amusing banter as they attempt to locate the pilfered cash before someone sends Mac off to the great beyond. Housewright leaves it tantalizingly ambiguous whether Leland's spirit is real. Readers will be entertained either way. Agent: Alison Picard, Alison J. Picard Agency. (May)

Rushmore McKenzie, the ex-cop turned millionaire turned unlicensed private investigator, is in danger. At least that's what his friend Shelby Dunston says: at an event featuring a psychic medium, McKenzie's name was uttered (by, the medium claims, the spirit of a dead person) in relation to a large sum of money that went missing years ago. What does Rushmore know about the missing money? Who might want to make sure he doesn't spill the beans? McKenzie is no stranger to danger, but this whole threat-from-beyond-the-grave business has him a little off-kilter. And when the number of people who seem to want him dead keeps getting bigger, the skeptical McKenzie starts to wonder whether there could really be something to this psychic stuff. Series fans will have a great time here, as Housewright offers readers a new side of the usually superconfident McKenzie, showing a man with all the answers forced to examine not just clues but also his own vulnerability.

St. Paul private eye Rushmore McKenzie (Dead Man's Mistress, 2019, etc.) gets a price put on his head by someone hot for revenge: a man he killed more than 20 years ago. Psychics can see the future; mediums can contact the dead. Psychic medium Hannah Braaten is a double threat who can do both. At a reading attended by McKenzie's childhood crush Shelby Dunston, Hannah reveals impossibly intimate personal details about half a dozen attendees before ending with a walloping climax: the news that Leland Hayes, whose armored-truck heist of $654,321 ended 22 years ago when McKenzie, hot in pursuit of the thief as a member of the force, shot him dead, is willing to tell his son and accomplice, ex-con Ryan Hayes, where the money is if only Ryan will kill McKenzie. "Dead men do not talk from the grave," McKenzie tells himself when he hears the news. "They certainly don't arrange assassinations." Even so, it's a gorgeous setup, enriched even further by the entrance of up-and-coming psychic medium Kayla Janas, whose astral contacts lead Bobby Dunston to the body of missing housewife Ruth Nowak even though her readings aren't quite as reliable as Hannah's, maybe because she's still a college freshman. As the two mediums angle to land a contract that will star them in Model Medium, a new TV series, McKenzie, Shelby, and Nina Truhler, his live-in lover, all worry that McKenzie's own contract may be canceled. And evidently with reason: Shortly after he transfers the tracking device on his car to a pesky neighbor's vehicle, that neighbor is found dead. And there's mounting evidence that the late Leland Hayes, concerned that Ryan might not take up his deal, is offering it to "anyone who will listen." It's a disappointment but not a surprise that the payoff doesn't fulfill the promise of this premise. What could? Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.