Most Popular Books by Stuart M. Kaminsky

Goodness has nothing to do with it as a hard-luck private eye in 1940s Hollywood takes a case for legendary silver screen sex symbol Mae West. In the early days of talking pictures, the greatest sex symbol in Hollywood was the platinum-blonde bad girl Mae West. Naughty and gorgeous with a razor-sharp wit, West wrote her own material and controlled her own image—until the censors came in and outlawed the racy repartee that made her famous. By the forties, her star has faded and she''s banking everything on a scandalous memoir that she hopes will set the stage for a comeback. When the only copy is stolen, she calls in a favor from an old beau—the brother of wisecracking PI Toby Peters. When Mae West asks, "Why don''t you come up sometime and see me?" you don''t say no. Peters arrives at a party at West''s house, where every guest is a man dressed as the woman herself—and one of them may be the thief who stole the manuscript. But before he can tear off the culprit''s wig, Peters finds that this is about more than theft. The crook wants to destroy Mae West, and he has murder on his mind. The star of Edgar Award winner Stuart M. Kaminsky''s fun forties private eye series, "Peters is a good guy with a sense of humor, and every appearance he makes is a welcome one" ( Booklist).

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 sixty-two-year-old cop with bad knees, most days feel pretty long. But the longest day of Abe Lieberman''s life begins just after midnight when he learns his nephew David has been shot dead and David''s pregnant wife has been gravely injured by two gunmen trying to rob the couple. Now Carol is barely clinging to life, and it''s up to Lieberman to track down the killers. With the help of his partner, the troubled alcoholic Bill Hanrahan, Lieberman will turn the city upside down to find the men who stole his nephew''s bright future. But as they step out into the howling Chicago wind, it''s clear both partners will need to fight to survive the day that started out terrible and is about to get a lot worse. This day in the life of two veteran Chicago cops is "beautifully rendered . . . Kaminsky is extraordinarily attuned to the domestic minutiae of his detectives'' lives" ( The New York Times Book Review).

A "chilling . . . stunning thriller" from the Edgar Award–winning author of Exercise in Terror ( Booklist). It is 1957, and Jean Kaiser is pretending to sleep. When her parents go to bed, she''ll turn her radio on low, and groove to Elvis. But from her parents'' room, she hears something strange—her mother calling her name in a choking, terrified voice so chilling that Jean assumes it can''t be real, and wills herself to sleep. When she awakens in the morning, the nightmare has come true—a killer has slaughtered her parents in their bed. More than two decades later, Jean has done her best to move past her childhood trauma, parlaying a degree in psychology into a position as the host of a radio call-in show. One night, an anonymous caller shakes her to the core when he brings up details that remind her of her parents'' murder. When Jean and her daughter, Angie, get home, they find their pet parakeet crushed to death over Jean''s bed. Her parents'' killer has reemerged ready to tie up loose ends. The nightmare never ended, and now Jean and Angie must fight—or die.

Moscow''s top cops are on the case as multiple murders sweep the city. There''s Rostnikov, once a hero in the great war against Hitler, recently demoted after clashing with the KGB. There''s young Sasha, who looks more like a kid than a cop. And there''s Karpo, intelligent and determined, feared by criminals. Together, they would track down the killers -- but what if their search led into forbidden areas, into the Kremlin itself?

One Dead Commissar At an icebound naval weather station in far Siberia, the young daughter of an exiled dies under suspicious circumstances. The high-ranking Commissar sent to investigate the mystery suffers a similar fate: he is murdered by an icicle thrust into his skull. One Live Cop Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov is dispatched to solve the Commissar''s murder, with one caveat: he is not to investigate the girl''s death. Even if all the clues tell him that the two cases are linked. One Cold Killer In a single, fateful day, Rostnikov will hear two confessions, watch someone die, conspire against the government, and nearly meet his own death. All under the watchful eye of the KGB -- and someone much closer and infinitely more terrifying.

An original novel based on the critically acclaimed hit CBS series CSI: New York, by one of the most impressive crime writers of the twentieth century. Detective Mac Taylor is a dedicated crime scene investigator who believes that everything is connected and everyone has a story. He and Detective Stella Bonasera lead a team of crack forensic experts through the gritty and kinetic world of New York City as they piece together clues and eliminate doubt to ultimately crack their cases. A modest home in a suburban Queens neighborhood is the unlikely site of a grisly crime scene: a married couple and their daughter are found brutally murdered. Missing from the scene is the couple’s young son, and Mac Taylor and Danny Messer soon uncover signs of a possible kidnapping. Can they find him before it’s too late? In a heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn, the body of a devoutly religious man is found ritually displayed on the floor of his synagogue. Stella Bonasera and Aiden Burn initially suspect a fringe fundamentalist group that has had run-ins with the victim’s congregation, but the group is led by a charismatic and antagonistic man who does everything he can to stonewall the team’s investigation. Two very different crimes, with one thing in common: CSI investigators who won’t stop until they uncover the truth.

In this book, Kaminsky and other scholars use the sophisticated critical tools of contemporary literary and film analysis to examine popular American television genres. Critical approaches ranging from historical to anthropological to structural and psychoanalytic are clearly presented and then used to analyze a variety of shows including soap operas, police dramas, game shows, and news programs. Throughout the book the authors explore the ways in ehich the genres of popular television regularly viewed by millions are significant on a cultural and social level. These explorations reveal that popular television can be understood as a rich and complex art form. This book will provide the student with a detailed introduction to the art of television criticism.

A process server quits his job and flees town to escape the memories of his beloved late wife. When his car breaks down in Florida, Lew Fonesca settles there and is hired find a man''s missing wife. Lew ends up being trailed by a mysterious burly man and saddled with the missing-person case of a runaway teen.

Stuart Kaminsky takes the readers into the personal lives and homes of well-known contemporary mystery writers.

A veteran Chicago cop who''s also a mensch, "Lieberman is endearing, wise in his crochets, weary with his wisdom" ( The Washington Post Book World). Thirty-three years ago, Connie Gower pulled a gun in a synagogue. He had come to avenge his brother, a two-bit hoodlum who''d been killed in a shootout with a young cop named Abe Lieberman. But Lieberman outsmarted him, and put Gower in jail. After serving his time, for the next few decades Gower bounced around the Chicago underworld, making a name for himself as a second-rate mob enforcer. Fate is a funny thing. When Gower gets arrested in Yuma, Arizona, it''s an aged Abe Lieberman who goes to bring him home, leaving his longtime partner Bill Hanrahan back in the windy city to put up with the hot air of his racist substitute. Handcuffed to each other, Lieberman and his prisoner are about to board the plane when a geriatric janitor shuffles towards them and shoots Gower dead. Connie Gower was scum, but killing him is still murder, and Lieberman is determined to find out who ordered the hit—and why. Edgar Award winner Stuart M. Kaminsky''s The Last Dark Place is "an entertaining crime novel that should send new readers in search of its predecessors" ( Publishers Weekly).

Jim Rockford finds himself entangled in a dangerous mess when a seventeen-year-old girl claiming to be his daughter shows up on his doorstep and asks for his help in discovering what has happened to her mother, who she thinks may have been killed by her s

Kaminsky''s series character Toby Peters appears with John Wayne in The Man Who Shot Lewis Valance and D.W. Griffith in Busted Blossoms. Hidden finds a determined detective searching for the truth when a teenage boy is suspected of savagely killing his family. In Drop Number One, who can tell who is crazy and who is not when three men break out of an insane asylum?

Lew Fonesca is faced with one case that will try his patience and another that may break his heart. He finds that they are tied together in ways he can''t hope to untangle.

A PI performs some fancy footwork to protect Fred Astaire as “Edgar winner Kaminsky effortlessly choreographs Hollywood history . . . and dirty doings” (Publishers Weekly). Sometimes fools must step in where Fred Astaire fears to tap. Luna Martin, the moll of a well-known Los Angeles gangster nicknamed “Fingers” (because he likes to cut them off), has demanded dance lessons from Hollywood’s finest hoofer—and whatever Luna wants, Luna gets. To sidestep the flirtations of the lead-footed lady, Astaire hires private investigator Toby Peters to pose as a dance instructor and take over the lessons. But when someone cuts in and cuts Luna’s throat, the grieving gangster makes Peters an offer he can’t refuse: Find the killer—or go from having two left feet to one foot in the grave. Now, instead of punishing the parquet, the silver screen’s most famous song-and-dance man is pounding the pavement with his new partner—a rumpled, middle-aged gumshoe who just wants to live to shuffle through another day . . .

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 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 with an underage woman. Although Flynn insists it’s a fake, the studio is taking no chances. Peters is to deliver the blackmailer five thousand dollars and return with the photo negative. It should be simple, but Flynn, a swashbuckler on and off the screen, has a way of making things complicated. Soon it’s up to Peters to clear Flynn’s name, following a twisted trail that surprisingly leads to the set of The Maltese Falcon, involving Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, and Sydney Greenstreet. As real-life PI Toby Peters meets Bogie’s Sam Spade, he doesn’t fall prey to being star-struck. But he may still fall prey to a killer. “If you like your mysteries Sam Spade tough, with tongue in cheek and a touch of the theatrical, then the Toby Peters series is just your ticket.” —Houston Chronicle

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 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. The case is given to Porfiry Rostnikov, a veteran Moscow police inspector with a knack for navigating the labyrinths of Soviet bureaucracy. A bruising bear of a man, whose love of weightlifting and American pizza has left him as squat and powerful as a .38 bullet, Rostnikov may be the toughest cop in Moscow. This winter, his challenge is not just to find the killer, but to survive the investigation, as every question he asks takes him closer to exposing the dark heart of the KGB. A Cold War–era hero, Porfiry Rostnikov is “quite simply the best cop to come out of the Soviet Union since Martin Cruz Smith’s Arkady Renko in Gorky Park.” (San Francisco Examiner)

Private eye Toby Peters follows boxing as much as the next guy, but he never expected to encounter heavyweight champ Joe Louis this way: covered with blood and standing next to the corpse of Peters'' ex-wife''s husband on a deserted beach! Martin''s.

Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov and his colleagues battle against a conspiracy to assassinate a politburo member, a bomb scare at Lenin''s tomb, and abounding corruption