Stuart M. Kaminsky

As a hard-boiled Hollywood PI enlists Al Capone's help to save the Marx Brothers, Kaminsky "makes the totally wacky possible" (The Washington Post). 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...

In this "marvelously entertaining" mystery, a hard-boiled Hollywood private eye investigates a murdered Munchkin on the set of The Wizard of Oz (Newsday). 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...

This Chicago cop drama is "jam-packed with the stuff of good crime fiction - character, style, place, recognizable human conflict" (The Washington Post). 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...

Inspector Rostnikov is a Russian bear of a man, an honest policeman in a very dishonest post-Soviet Russia....

A Moscow cop is left out in the cold in this "impressive" Edgar Award winner for Best Mystery Novel (The Washington Post Book World). 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...

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...

This "enjoyable lark" is a road-trip mystery with an old Hollywood backdrop, starring PI Toby Peters and the great comic W. C. Fields (Library Journal). Under names like Otis J. Raisincluster, Quigley E. Sneersight, and Cormorant Beecham III, W. C. Fields squirreled away nearly a million dollars...

The first in a mystery series set in 1940s Hollywood, where a hard-boiled private eye helps a cast of real-life stars: "Nostalgic fun" (Publishers Weekly). 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...

The final Toby Peters Hollywood whodunit from the Edgar Award-winning author is "a marvelous magic trick of a mystery" featuring Harry Blackstone (Booklist, starred review). When an anonymous rival demands that master illusionist Harry Blackstone reveal his secrets on stage or die, the magician...

In this mystery introducing a hard-boiled Soviet police inspector, "Kaminsky gets Russia right" (Ed McBain). 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...

Two Chicago cops need to defuse an explosive situation in this "tightly plotted" police procedural (Chicago Tribune). After killing his wife and her lover, an unhinged and heavily armed Chicago cop named Bernie Shepard barricades himself at the top of a high-rise apartment building and sends a...

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...

On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Howard Hughes hires Hollywood gumshoe Toby Peters to find stolen blueprints in this "marvelously entertaining" series (Newsday). Millionaire Howard Hughes likes his secrets. He likes to keep them - and he definitely doesn't like having them stolen. Hollywood PI Toby...

A Soviet cop stars in this novel of "sweaty-palmed suspense.... Equal parts likeable characters and believable dangers" (The Washington Post Book World). The Moscow Film Festival is in town, and the elite artists of the East and West have convened at the legendary Metropole Hotel to drink...

This "superb mystery-thriller" featuring a Moscow cop reminiscent of Arkady Renko delivers "riveting suspense" (Publishers Weekly). Porfiry Rostnikov and his wife, Sarah, have been in love for decades, since the end of World War II. Now the police inspector is by his wife's bedside as she...

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...

A local curmudgeon who has been campaigning to end state-sponsored school funding is brutally killed....

A Chicago cop is out to avenge his nephew's murder in this "masterly creation" that puts the Edgar Award-winning author in "the Parker/Paretsky league" (Chicago Tribune). When you're a 62-year-old cop with bad knees, most days feel pretty long. But the longest day of Abe Lieberman's life begins...

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...

Mildred Minck is an unremarkable woman - until one tragic night in June 1944 when she becomes the first citizen of Los Angeles to be murdered by crossbow. The prime suspect is her husband, dentist Sheldon Minck, who's found standing over her body with the weapon in hand, raving that only Joan...