Stuart M. Kaminsky

It should have been an easy score - a suburban house on a quiet cul-de-sac, with the owners scheduled to be gone all night. But career burglar George Patniks has chosen the wrong time to go breaking and entering, because tonight Harvey Rozier will murder his wife....

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....

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, gossip, and flirt. But the party is about to come crashing down....

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....

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 recuperates from a brain operation, when a massive naked man staggers into her hospital room, scared out of his mind....

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....

Tension runs high as a Moscow cop investigates murder under the big top....

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....

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....

Detectives Abe Lieberman and Bill Hanrahan have been partners a long time - long enough to call each other "Rabbi" and "Father Murphy"....

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 have a job for him....

A corrupt commissar has been stabbed through the eye with an icicle. A murder at this level should be a top priority, but Rostnikov gets the distinct impression that the powers-that-be would prefer this case go unsolved - and that Rostnikov not survive this Siberian winter....

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....

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....

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....

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....

On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Howard Hughes hires Hollywood gumshoe Toby Peters to find stolen blueprints....

Lew Fonesca is a Sarasota part-time process server still mourning his dead wife and trying to get through life without any complications....

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 today, the mood at Maish's is grim. Someone has vandalized the local temple and stolen a priceless Torah, and only Abe Lieberman can set things right...

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