What Doesn’t Kill Us is the 18th installment in the P.I. Rushmore MacKenzie series and a real surprise. Early in the book, Mac is shot and spends the majority of the book in a medically induced coma while his friends and associates do the detecting. This gives us several separate investigations tracking the various threads that take them far afield while circling back with delicious synchronicity.

His best friend is police Lt. Bobby Dunston who absolutely cannot lead the investigation so  he assigns his partner, a woman decidedly not fond of Mac. But there are the people he has done favors for in the past and they are returning the favor with brilliance and diligence. It is a delight to see how the disparate investigations following different trails all end up at the same place. Frankly, there is a hilarious, nearly slapstick denouement. I loved it.

I love Mac and it almost feels disloyal to love a book where he is unconscious through most of it, but I loved What Doesn’t Kill Us. It was a delight to see his friends take up for him. I loved how some of the less-than-legitimate friends were just as effective as the cops. So I love camp and I love capers and this felt like both and with Mac narrating the entire story in the past tense, there was no real sense of jeopardy to temper our enjoyment of the caper.

I received an e-galley of What Doesn’t Kill Us from the publisher through NetGalley.