FROM THE GRAVE

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?