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....

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....

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 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....

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....

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....

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....

After the death of his wife, a grieving Lew Fonesca drives from Chicago until his car gives out in the parking lot of a Sarasota, Florida, Dairy Queen. Trying to avoid his emotions and rebuild his life, he takes up work as a freelance process server. One of the attorneys he works for gives him...

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

After a lifetime in service to the Soviet Union, police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov may have found a way out. A high-profile homicide leads him to a cache of documents packed full of incriminating Kremlin gossip....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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 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....

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....

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....

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....

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 message to the police: Meet his demands, or he'll detonate enough explosives to blow the whole block sky high....

In the 1960s, Russian children wanted to be cosmonauts like Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space. But the Soviet Union is history, and Gagarin's glory is long gone. For the men and women aboard the decaying Mir space station, life is an unending series of near-disasters....