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 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...

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 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...

Lew Fonesca returns to his hometown of Chicago, finds out who killed his wife, and confronts a murderer who'll not hesitate to kill again to make sure hidden secrets stay buried

In post-Soviet Union Russia, Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov must search for a serial killer who has claimed at least forty victims, while also protecting a British journalist who is researching a story about a Moscow prostitution ring

Moscow Police Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov puts himself in league with members of the Russian Mafia, who feel that the murders of two of their own are related to new gang wars

Hollywood detective Toby Peters does a job for one of Tinseltown's finest 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-missing persons and bodyguard work, mostly-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...

Just days after the end of the USSR, a mysterious priest becomes a martyr In service of his beloved Orthodox Church, Father Merhum has spent decades battling Soviet apparatchiks and the KGB. Now the Soviet Union is gone, but the bureaucracy survives, and the aged priest makes plans to denounce Communist supporters, including some within the Church. He is on his way to Moscow when an assassin stops him with an ax. And as he dies, Merhum begs for forgivenessa...

Toby and his brother team up to protect a magician from disappearing for good In the six years since he lost his job working security at the Warner Brothers' lot, private investigator Toby Peters has taken cases from oddballs ranging from Peter Lorre to W. C. Fields. But none of them had the stage presence of Harry Blackstone, the greatest magician in the world. When an anonymous rival demands the illusionist reveal his secrets on stage or suffer...

Rostnikov confronts a mystery that stretches from Moscow to the stars Once, Russian children wanted to be cosmonauts like Yuri Gagarin. But the Soviet Union is dead, and the days of Gagarin's glory are long passed. 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...

In post–Cold War Moscow, business is booming and crime pays Capitalism has come to Russia, and money is raining from the sky. As the trickle of cash turns to a torrent, bureaucrats become oligarchs, and the brutal Russian mafia consolidates its power. In the center of this madness is police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov, a thoughtful detective who is struggling to adjust to life in these turbulent times.   A prominent businessman is kidnapped in...