Showing results by author "Stuart M. Kaminsky" in All Categories

In the waning days of the Russian Empire, the Czar inked a secret treaty with Japan that was stolen en route by one of the workmen on the Trans-Siberian Railway. More than 100 years later, the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Czardom, and police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov is trying to find his way in the Russia of Vladimir Putin. 

In the 1960s, Russian children wanted to be cosmonauts like Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space. But the Soviet Union is history, and Gagarin's glory is long gone. For the men and women aboard the decaying Mir space station, life is an unending series of near-disasters. During one such breakdown, cosmonaut Tsimion Vladovka asks ground control to contact Moscow police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov if anything happens to him.

It's the mid-'90s, and capitalism and privatization have come to Russia. As the trickle of cash turns to a torrent, bureaucrats become oligarchs, and the brutal Russian mafia is on the rise. Newfound democracy has not reduced the crime rate, and Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov, a 40-year veteran of the Moscow police department, and his colleagues have their hands full. 

Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov is finding spring in Yalta to be quite lovely. But his time off is destined to be short-lived. A former colleague with emphysema has come south to improve his health. Instead Georgi Vasilievich has dropped dead from what appears to be heart failure. The inspector is not so sure. 

The Soviet Union is dead, and Russian society has been fractured into a thousand pieces. Through those cracks seeps the first serial killer in the country's history, whose exploits send Moscow into a frenzy. As his colleagues hunt for the pipe-wielding maniac who's killed 40 women so far, Police Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov must depart for Havana to avoid an international incident. 

Since the start of World War II, Cary Grant has been working undercover in Hollywood as a spy for the British crown. When a ring of Nazi sympathizers gets wise, they start blackmailing the debonair leading man. Now Grant has hired Toby Peters to handle the payoff. But when the blackmailer is killed, the rumpled detective and the suave movie star are thrust into a complex plot of murder, money, and Nazi spies, leading to a literal cliff-hanger.... 

It's 1941, and the Marx Brothers' first movie for MGM, Go West, has the country in stitches. But now Chico Marx is worried he's going to need stitches when he receives a severed ear in the mail - a simple message from a Chicago bookie who wants $120,000, or else. Chico is baffled because, although he loves to gamble, he's never made a bet in Chicago. Desperate, he turns to the king of Hollywood, Louis B. Mayer, who puts in a call to Toby Peters.

On December 10, 1938, Atlanta burned again. In the back lot at David O. Selznick's studio, sets from a dozen old pictures were pushed together and set ablaze to provide a backdrop for the climax of what Selznick promised to be the movie of the century: Gone with the Wind. Toby Peters, then just a studio security guard, was on hand to help keep the Confederate extras in line. When the fire was over, he found one of them dead, impaled on his own sword.

dentist dangles from the window of a swanky Park Avenue hotel, while Toby Peters, a Los Angeles detective who's very far from home, clutches the man by his jacket, which is tearing slowly, stitch by stitch. Across the room, a dead man lies on the bed, his killer pounding on the hotel room door, which sounds like it's going to give way as quickly as the dentist's jacket. Somehow, this entire mess is Albert Einstein's fault. Two nefarious groups have been threatening the great physicist. One is a ring of blackmailers who claim to have evidence that he has been passing nuclear secrets to Russia.

The uniformed man standing before Toby Peters is General Douglas MacArthur, a soldier who considers himself the only man who can defeat the Japanese. But though he may be all-powerful in the South Pacific, today he is in Los Angeles with a problem only a detective can solve. The general has an eye on a postwar promotion to the White House, and an aide has stolen his war chest, his donor list, and a handful of embarrassing private letters. To get them back, Toby may need some help.

Coffins fill the basement of a crumbling Los Angeles movie theater. Five vampires crowd around fading horror idol Bela Lugosi, peppering him with questions. A malfunctioning plastic fang causes one of the undead-wannabes to lisp. The effect is less than fearsome, but Lugosi is terrified, for one of these oddballs has been making threats on his life. He hires Toby Peters to provide security against his unbalanced fans. The detective is not concerned, but he should be.

An ax-wielding monk hacks at the door. Toby Peters is on the other side, running as fast as his recently broken leg will allow. Alongside him is Salvador Dalí, dressed in a rabbit suit, insistently muttering "grasshoppers" as they try to make their escape. Dalí insists on being carried across the lawn, so Peters hobbles along with the surrealist in his arms. They get in the car just as the monk chops down the front door. The car doesn't start, and the monk charges silently, the ax in the air.

Hollywood detective Toby Peters is asleep on his floor when the dentist who shares his office calls, wailing that his wife has left him. While on the one hand, Toby is shocked that a woman as unpleasant as Mildred could ever attract a suitor, he's even more surprised by the name of the alleged Lothario: Peter Lorre, the scaly-voiced, bug-eyed Hollywood character actor. Though he can't imagine why the dentist would want her back, Toby agrees to track down his missing wife. He finds Lorre in a greasy spoon near the Warner Brothers' lot, but the actor doesn't know a thing about the missing Mildred....

You can't trust a man who's dressed as Mae West, especially not in Mae West's house. One of Hollywood's earliest sex symbols, the whip-smart blonde's star has fallen since the Hays Code cracked down on the racy repartee that made her famous. Her latest project is a thinly veiled autobiographical novel, whose only copy is stolen just after she finishes her first draft. Tonight she's having a Mae West party, with every guest a man dressed as her. The thief is among those in drag, and P.I. Toby Peters has come to tear off his wig. He's there as a favor to his brother, a brutal cop who had a fling with West when she first moved to Hollywood.

Three years ago, Lew Fonseca quit his job as a process server with the State's Attorney's office in Cook County, Illinois, and headed for Key West. Sidetracked by fate when his car broke down in Sarasota, Florida, he decided to stick around, making ends meet by doing some investigative work for local attorneys. Asked to locate the missing wife of a well-known local entrepreneur, Lew learns that finding Melanie Sebastian is anything but simple.

A local curmudgeon who has been campaigning to end state-sponsored school funding is brutally killed. A recent graduate of a public high school for the gifted is arrested for the crime and turns to Lew for help. A semi-retired and much beloved singer of children's songs is being anonymously pushed to leave Sarasota, threatened with exposure as a sexual predator. It is up to Lew to uncover the blackmailer and determine whether there is any truth to the accusation.

Toby Peters wakes up with a headache, a gun in his face, and a body on the hotel-room bed. He is less surprised by the gun than by the man holding it: Marion Morrison, a.k.a John Wayne. Both of them were lured here by the dead man. The next arrival is a prostitute named Olivia, and hot on her heels is the house detective, who's come to check on the commotion in Room 303.

The year 1942 is a bad time to stage Madame Butterfly. Although Puccini's masterpiece is a perennial favorite of the San Francisco opera crowd, its sympathetic depiction of a Japanese girl causes tension in the dark months following Pearl Harbor. Newspaper editorialists rage against the production, opera buffs picket the theater, and a note appears nailed to the house door, threatening violence against the cast and crew. When the first workman dies, the maestro calls Toby Peters, a Los Angeles detective who works discreetly for Hollywood's rich and famous.

Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov is an honest policeman in a very dishonest post-Soviet Union. He and his team are searching for a serial killer who has claimed at least 40 victims. And then there is the problem of protecting a visiting British journalist who is working on a story about a Moscow prostitution ring. In doing so Rostnikov and his team uncover a chain of murders that lead to a source too high to be held accountable if the police want to keep their jobs - or their lives.

When an anonymous rival demands that master illusionist Harry Blackstone reveal his secrets on stage or die, the magician hires Toby Peters and his brother, ex-cop Phil Pevsner, to run security for his show at the famous Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Of course, Peters doesn't expect the job to include replacing a showgirl for Blackstone's show-stopping sawing-a-woman-in-half trick after the saboteur has stolen the blade.