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 Rostnikov and his team at the Office of Special Investigation busier than ever. So it's fortunate that having his bad leg amputated six months ago and replaced by a prosthetic limb has not slowed down the veteran Moscow cop one bit.
Now he's investigating a hate-fueled crime wave, as a bloodthirsty gunman wages a campaign to systematically exterminate the city's Jews. At the same time, a knife-wielding rapist is running rampant. Despite the urgent demand to end the mayhem, the inspector finds himself most intrigued by a centuries-old mystery concerning a murdered baroness and a priceless golden wolf statue that has been missing since 1862.
Stuart Kaminsky's long-running, Edgar Award-winning series has seen his intensely moral Moscow police inspector through the turbulence of several regimes, and always 'Kaminsky takes care not to rob his beleaguered cops of their human core' (The New York Times).
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 big business, the Mafia got involved, and venues upgraded from alleys and garages to private arenas with padded seats. Police Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov has assigned Sasha Tkach and Elena Timofeyeva to go undercover and bust up a dogfighting ring. But the only ones more vicious than the dogs are the ones who profit from them.
Speaking of fighting in the streets, an international drug cartel has chosen Moscow as its next port of call. One man stands in their way-a young Russian mobster whose brutality is matched only by his madness. In a gang war of this magnitude, no civilian is safe. It's up to Rostnikov and the Office of Special Investigation to prevent a full-scale bloodbath.
'As usual, Kaminsky manages to make the postlapsarian fracas strangely engrossing. His major characters are vivid and varied . . . Good storytelling in yet another of a distinguished series.' -Kirkus Reviews
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 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. During one such breakdown, cosmonaut Tsimion Vladovka asks ground control to contact Moscow police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov if anything happens to him.
The cosmonaut returns to Earth safely, but a year later he goes missing and his former crew members start turning up dead. Vladovka was in possession of state secrets, so there's also a potential security risk. He must be found, dead or alive. In the days of the USSR, no one could navigate the bureaucratic maze of the Kremlin like Rostnikov-but he's never encountered anything like the labyrinth that is Star City, home of the Russian space program. Still, the veteran policeman is convinced: The answer to what happened to the cosmonaut on Earth lies in something that happened in space.
A Moscow cop juggles cases of kidnapping, murder, and a missing Czarist-era document in a modern-day mystery with 'never a dull moment' (Library Journal).
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 a one hundred years later, the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Czardom, and police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov is trying to find his way in the Russia of Vladimir Putin. A large amount of money is being sent from Odessa to Vladivostok to purchase a mysterious Czarist document, and Rostnikov's superior believes it may be this long-lost treaty. Eastbound ticket in hand, Rostnikov sets out to investigate. Meanwhile, his subordinates in Moscow tackle a female Jack the Ripper and an anti-Semitic punk rocker whose mob connections may have gotten him kidnapped. It's a brave new world in western Russia, but where Rostnikov is going, the landscape hasn't changed in centuries.
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 assigned to only the most hopeless cases, one of which is about to take Rostnikov deep into Siberia.
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.
This 'superb mystery-thriller' featuring a Moscow cop reminiscent of Arkady Renko delivers 'riveting suspense' (Publishers Weekly).
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, and tries to jump out the window. Rostnikov restrains the bearlike man, trying to calm him. As orderlies arrive to return the escapee to the mental ward, he cries out: 'The devil came to devour the factory.'
Rostnikov has far more important things on his mind than deciphering the ravings of a lunatic, first among them Sarah's recovery. And of course crime has not stopped while he cares for his wife. Rebels are planting bombs, teenagers are plotting assassinations, and the KGB lurks in every shadow. But despite all these clamors, the man's strange words continue to haunt Rostnikov-and compel him to investigate.
Murder intrudes on a Moscow cop's vacation: 'Kaminsky's Rostnikov novels are among the best mysteries being written' (The San Diego Union-Tribune).
Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov is finding spring in Yalta to be quite lovely. Accompanying his wife, Sarah, as she gets much needed rest and recuperation after her surgery, reading American crime novels, and gazing at the Black Sea, the Moscow cop is reasonably content-even if his superiors did insist that he take this vacation. But his time off is destined to be short-lived. A former colleague with emphysema has come south to improve his health. Instead Georgi Vasilievich has dropped dead from what appears to be heart failure. The inspector is not so sure.
The local officials want to sweep the incident under the rug. But it turns out Vasilievich was investigating a high-level military conspiracy. Rostnikov takes a look at his files, putting him on the trail of a gang of hardliners who refuse to give up the Soviet dream-and who will go to murderous lengths to ensure that perestroika never comes to pass.
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. Father Merhum is on his way to Moscow to denounce those traitors when he is struck with an ax and killed.
As police inspectors Porfiry Rostnikov and Emil Karpo dig into the past of this celebrated village priest, they uncover strange church secrets and a conspiracy to carry the vile corruption of the former regime on into the twenty-first century. But if they don't watch their steps, someone may need to say the last rites for them.
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. As his colleagues hunt for the pipe-wielding maniac who's killed forty women so far, police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov must depart for Havana to avoid an international incident.
First, Rostnikov must confront his fear of flying-or more specifically, flying on Russian airplanes. Assuming he lands safely in Havana, this case will require the utmost diplomacy. A Russian politician is accused of murdering a young Cuban woman. Rostnikov's superiors want things wrapped up cleanly and quickly. Unfortunately, their man in Havana is about to discover there is nothing simple about this murder.
In an era of financial free-for-all in Russia, a Moscow cop deals with rampant crime in a 'terrific' and 'exceptional' police drama (Detroit Free Press).
It's the mid-nineties, 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. Newfound democracy has not reduced the crime rate, and Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov, a forty-year veteran of the Moscow police department, and his colleagues have their hands full.
A prominent businessman is kidnapped in broad daylight. Three children-as innocent looking as they are savage-terrorize a slum. And a house full of Czarist treasures is raided by tax police-only to have every piece vanish the following day.
As criminals at all levels rush to exploit a system in confusion, 'Inspector Porfiry Rostnikov is a rarity among policemen: shrewd, utterly incorruptible and destined to survive each complex political shift' (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
In this 'marvelously entertaining' mystery, a hard-boiled Hollywood private eye investigates a murdered Munchkin on the set of The Wizard of Oz (Newsday).
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-or why she finds a Munchkin in full costume, lying facedown with a knife buried in his back.
To avoid even a whiff of scandal and protect Judy's wholesome image, the studio boss hires Toby Peters, a Hollywood private detective with a reputation for discretion. But as Peters quickly learns, the real threat to Miss Garland isn't the tabloids-it's the psychopathic killer who stalks the back lot and plans to kill the young actress next.
In addition to the murder mystery swirling around Judy Garland, the second Toby Peters novel features cameos from 'Clark Gable and Raymond Chandler [who] give an assist in this imaginative mystery recreated from yesterday's movie-land' (The Plain Dealer, Cleveland).
On the eve of Pearl Harbor, Howard Hughes hires Hollywood gumshoe Toby Peters to find stolen blueprints in this 'marvelously entertaining' series (Newsday).
Millionaire Howard Hughes likes his secrets. He likes to keep them-and he definitely doesn't like having them stolen. Hollywood PI Toby Peters has a rep for being discreet. So when the film tycoon and aviation magnate needs a detective to very privately investigate the theft of top-secret blueprints taken from his home during one of his fabulous parties, he summons Peters. But what starts as counter-espionage intrigue turns into a triple murder, and Peters soon finds himself bait for a killer.
As America is pulled into World War II, Peters is just trying to stay alive as a gunman chases him through a deserted television soundstage. With help from some unlikely allies-including Basil Rathbone, the silver screen's Sherlock Holmes, and gangster/patriot Bugsy Siegel-Peters is determined to dodge the bullets long enough to recover the blueprints before they fall into the wrong hands.
