Stuart M. Kaminsky

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....

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

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.

With his Edgar Award-winning series about a Moscow cop, "Kaminsky's a master of tone, maintaining the edgy excitement of suspense" (The Washington Post). In the 1960s, Russian children wanted to be cosmonauts like Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space. But the Soviet Union is history, and...

Moscow's gone to the dogs in the "imaginative" Edgar Award-winning crime series about a conscientious Russian cop (The New York Times Book Review). With packs of stray wild canines roaming Moscow, it was inevitable that enterprising criminals would find a way to get rich. As dogfighting became...

In the Edgar Award-winning crime series featuring a veteran Moscow cop, "Kaminsky evokes Russian life like a born Muscovite" (The Philadelphia Inquirer). During the widespread corruption of the Yeltsin era, violent crime has risen in Moscow by 200 to 300 percent, keeping Inspector Porfiry...

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 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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

With his Chicago cops, Edgar Award winner "Kaminsky is hard to beat for a thoughtful, well-plotted, well-written mystery" (The Washington Post Book World). Most days, the counters at Maish's Deli on Chicago's North Side are crowded with elderly Jewish men who trade stories and crack wise. But...

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...