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Dramatis personae: Nina, pianist, proprietor, Rickie's, a nightclub and beloved of Mac; Jillian DeMarais, psychiatrist; Mac (Rushmore) McKenzie, private investigator; Herzog, his really big and really strong acquaintance; Unidentified Girl #15, who was rolled off the back of a pickup on Interstate 94 during a snowstorm and who has amnesia; Bobby Dunston, Commander, St. Paul Major Crimes Division; various college students, thugs, tails.
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When the novel opens, Unidentified Girl #15 has been rolled off the back of a pickup during a snowstorm on Interstate 94 near Minneapolis/St. Paul, the scene of our novel. Mac, after having avoided running over her, drags her to the side of the road and calls for assistance. She lives, but she has total amnesia. Mac and Nina agree to keep her for a few days, since she has no possessions and no identification. As soon as Mac becomes involved with the unidentified girl, people begin following him as he moves about the city. And then, Unidentified Girl #15, along with four guns and five thousand dollars, disappear from Mac and Nina's apartment, and Mac feels the urge to understand the missing girl, her torturers, and the tails.
During her stay with Mac, the girl let drop the name of a nearby town, and Mac starts his investigation there. As Mac begins his investigation with the high school principal in the small town, the tails start again, and they have guns. And then the police begin finding the bodies. The first is the girl's boyfriend, and Mac's stolen gun is beside him.
David Housewright is masterful at creating an intricate web of those who are evil to the core, those who think that their acts are just a wee bit wrong, and those who keep silent, and whose silence is death-dealing. In reading his work, I do feel that I am in the hands of an author who has published seventeen novels and who has spent his life in Minnesota. UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN #15 will remind those well-read in the mystery genre of the late Robert Parker's works (and not the modern knockoffs): Mac, like Parker's Spenser character, is rather a smart-aleck. He is resourceful and without fear; he operates at the edge of the law. His beloved, Nina, is not a psychotherapist, but he once dated a psychotherapist, and a psychiatrist does make a cameo in the present work. Nina, like Spenser's beloved, is smart and resourceful, a character who is fully developed and part of the action.
§ C. Downs, Ph.D., is professor of English at Texas A&M University-Kingsville and a fan of the well-turned whodunit.
Reviewed by Cathy Downs, July 2015
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