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

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.

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.

A year after The Wizard of Oz's smash success, the yellow brick road is crumbling. The famous sets have been left standing on a soundstage in the depths of the MGM back lot in case the studio greenlights a sequel. But that doesn't explain what Judy Garland is doing there - or why she finds a Munchkin in full costume, lying facedown with a knife buried in his back.

Three years ago Lew Fonseca quit his job as a process server with the State Attorney's Office in Cook County, Illinois, and drove his rattling Toyota south to escape the memories of his beloved late wife. Headed for Key West, the Toyota broke down in a Dairy Queen parking lot in Sarasota, Florida. Buoyed by the friendship of a few trustworthy souls, Lew settled there, making ends meet by doing some investigative work for local attorneys.

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.

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.

Aleksander Granovsky has dedicated his life to exposing the brutality of the Russian penal system. In two days, he will be tried for the crime of smuggling essays to the West. It is a show trial, and there is no doubt he will be convicted and executed, yet before he dies, he intends to tell the truth one more time. But this is Moscow, where death is never heroic. While writing his final speech in his government flat, Granovsky is surprised by an assassin, who pierces his heart with the point of a rusty scythe.

Hollywood, 1940: It's been four years since security guard Toby Peters got fired from the Warner Brothers lot for breaking a screen cowboy's arm. Since then he's scratched out a living as a private detective - but now his old friends, the Warners, have a job for him. Someone has mailed the studio a picture of Errol Flynn caught in a compromising position with an underage woman. Although Flynn insists it's a fake, the studio is taking no chances. Peters is to deliver the blackmailer 5,000 dollars and return with the photo negative.

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....

In the darkest hours of communist rule, Father Merhum fought to protect the sanctity of the Orthodox Church. Now the Soviet Union is gone, but the bureaucracy survives, and within it lurk men who would do anything to undermine the fragile new Russian democracy. Father Merhum is on his way to Moscow to denounce those traitors when he is struck with an ax and killed.

Detectives Abe Lieberman and Bill Hanrahan have been partners a long time - long enough to call each other "Rabbi" and "Father Murphy". Lieberman is 60, a grandfather, and a devout Jew. Hanrahan is a lapsed Catholic who's been hitting the bottle pretty heavily ever since his wife walked out on him. They may be flawed, but they're good cops. But even good cops have bad days.

During the widespread corruption of the Yeltsin era, violent crime has risen in Moscow by 200 to 300 percent, keeping Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov and his team at the Office of Special Investigation busier than ever. So it's fortunate that having his bad leg amputated six months ago and replaced by a prosthetic limb has not slowed down the veteran Moscow cop one bit.

Porfiry Rostnikov was one of the top detectives in Moscow - until he crossed the KGB. On the orders of the secret service, this bulldog cop is busted down to the minor crimes unit, where his talents are utterly wasted. When a drunk climbs the statue of Nikolai Gogol in Arbat Square and threatens to kill himself, Rostnikov tries to talk the man down. But with a perfect somersault, acrobat Valerian Duznetzov leaps from the statue - the final jump of a storied career.

Under names like Otis J. Raisincluster, Quigley E. Sneersight, and Cormorant Beecham III, W. C. Fields squirreled away nearly a million dollars in banks across the country during his vaudeville days - before he became one of the silver screen's most recognizable funnymen. But it's no laughing matter when a burglar has the audacity to rob him blind, stealing his bankbooks and cleaning out his accounts. Steaming, the comedian hires Hollywood private investigator Toby Peters to track down the missing dough and protect what remains of his nest egg.

When the wife of a mob witness is killed and his teenage son is kidnapped, the ransom isn't cash - it's his life. The dead can't testify. If the witness kills himself, the mob will let his son live. Now veteran cops Abe Lieberman and Bill Hanrahan need to protect their witness from himself while they turn Chicago's gangland upside down to save the kid. It doesn't help that Hanrahan is newly sober in AA, battling drink urges and the guilt of recently losing another informant. Lieberman has seen his partner at his worst with the booze and always had his back.

When forced to choose between the law and the party line, Police Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov has a disturbing tendency to fight for justice, and that has won him no friends at the Kremlin. Now his enemies in the KGB have arranged a transfer to the lowest rungs of Moscow law enforcement, a backwater department assigned to only the most hopeless cases, one of which is about to take Rostnikov deep into Siberia.

Lew Fonesca is a Sarasota part-time process server still mourning his dead wife and trying to get through life without any complications. But his life is full of them. His shrink wants him to dump his grief so he can have more of a life; a pretty social worker who has helped him in the past wants to "deepen" their friendship; and his big heart prevents him from saying no to people who need his help.

Lew Fonesca is a man who does things for people. He makes small problems go away and tries to keep the larger ones from landing his clients in jail. He finds deadbeats, errant spouses, and generally keeps the populace of Sarasota on the up and up.

After a lifetime in service to the Soviet Union, police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov may have found a way out. A high-profile homicide leads him to a cache of documents packed full of incriminating Kremlin gossip, which he uses as a bargaining chip to secure exit visas for himself and his Jewish wife. But just before the deal is concluded, Brezhnev's death sends the nation into turmoil, and makes escape impossible. His career derailed, the veteran cop is reduced to investigating penny-ante murders - one of which may lead somewhere very big indeed.

Millionaire Howard Hughes likes his secrets. He likes to keep them - and he definitely doesn't like having them stolen. Hollywood PI Toby Peters has a rep for being discreet. So when the film tycoon and aviation magnate needs a detective to very privately investigate the theft of top-secret blueprints taken from his home during one of his fabulous parties, he summons Peters. But what starts as counter-espionage intrigue turns into a triple murder, and Peters soon finds himself bait for a killer.