One of the weaker efforts in the Toby Peters' series. Also,sometimes the discrepancies evident from book to book are annoying. The Faraday (Farraday) building where Peters' office is located. Is the building 4,6 or 8 stories high? Is his office on the on the top floor or one floor below?Just how ...
This may be THE BEST POLICE PROCEDURAL EVER WRITTEN. Stuart Kaminsky flies under the radar compared to other mystery writers even though he has received his peers highest accolades and awards. His experiences: growing up in gritty Chicago; serving as a medic in the Army; on the Northwestern Uni...
1977, #2 Toby Peters, a rather seedy PI in 1940 Hollywood; satirical/historical PI. With its classic (if not quite classy) PI themes played extremely broadly, lots of cameos without becoming boring or weird/out of context, and nifty plots, this series is lots of fun. Here Toby tries to find out w...
Koko the Clown doesn’t appear in this opening salvo in a mystery series from Stuart M. Kaminsky, a short series following a “process server” named Lew Fonesca that was scribed a decade before Kaminsky died. My favorite series by Kaminsky is his light-hearted one featuring Toby Peters – ‘30s and ‘...
Four years ago, Lew Fonesca’s wife Catherine was struck and killed in a hit-and-run. Grief-stricken, he fled Chicago and wound up in Sarasota, Florida where he’s made a living as a process server. Four years on, he's still savoring his depression like fine wine, and his therapist--and sparring pa...
Illusion gets more deadly than reality on Toby Peters's twenty-fourth outing from Edgar-winning author Stuart M. Kaminsky. A string of star-studded successes—most recently with Cary Grant in To Catch a Spy and an edgy Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierced—has won Tinseltown detective Toby Peters a bit...
Peter Kaminsky's client is Albert Einstein, worried that Nazi Fifth columnists are besmirching his loyalty to the Allied cause. Almost incidentally, they may also be planning an assassination.
Why has fabulous Bette Davis - the best known face in the world behind Roosevelt and Hitler - been kidnapped not once, not twice, but three times? What in the world does this star abduction have to do with Third Reich designs on America's plans for a top-secret superbomber? And who else but Holly...
Sometimes audios work for me sometimes, not so much. Depends on how much and where I drive that particular week. With that said, I wasn't paying as much attention as I would have been had I been driving on a long straight stretch of road. We do have such roads in north Florida just not where ...
This is the fifth Porfiry Rostnikov novel I've read, but it is actually the third in the series. And what a striking difference the Rostnikov here is from the other stories. Here Porfiry is a bitter, and almost depressed old man. His attempts at blackmailing the KGB into letting him and his Je...
This is the first book that I've read by Stuart M. Kaminsky. I don't typically read detective novels, but I had this book (I have no idea where I got it from!) and decided to give it a try. I started it yesterday and finished it this afternoon. Suffice it to say, it was definitely a page turne...
The Moscow Film Festival may lack Cannes' boats, bikinis, and gentle breezes, but it has nevertheless attracted scores of international actors, directors, and deal-makers. For some, the festival represents Moscow's re-emergence as a world-class city. But for a gang of zealots headed by a beautifu...
It's always fun to watch Toby Peters interact with the great and famous, and usually end up as poor as he was to start with. This caper has him leaving his familiar Los Angeles haunts to travel to San Francisco at Leopold Stokowski's request. The conductor is helping bring opera back to a long-...
I know Kaminsky is a MWA Grand Master, but this book was really disappointing. The story takes place in 1944 and involves Cary Grant working as a spy for British Intelligence hunting down Nazis in Los Angeles. OK. Ridiculous. But, my big complaint is that Kaminsky doesn't let a single bit of his ...
As readers of my reviews most certainly realize, I read and enjoy books from many different genres. However, if I had to choose just one type of book, there's no question that the mystery would be my choice. A talented mystery writer must demonstrate a deep and nuanced understanding of human natu...
10/20/07TITLE/AUTHOR: LIEBERMAN'S FOLLY by Stuart KaminskyRATING: 4.5/B+GENRE/PUB DATE/# OF PGS: Mystery/1991/216 pgsSERIES/STAND ALONE: 1st in the Abe Lieberman/Bill Hanrahan series TIME/PLACE: 1990's/ChicagoCHARACTERS: Abe Lieberman "rabbi" & Bill Hanrahan "priest" -- police detectives FIR...
Toby Peters, the Hollywood private eye who has previously saved the likes of Judy Garland, Gary Cooper, and the Marx Brothers, is back. This time there’s trouble under the big top, and his services are required by none other than Emmett Kelly.A circus elephant has been electrocuted and Kelly fear...
It's 1942 and private detective Toby Peters is hired by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt to retrieve the President's beloved pooch Fala. Mrs. Roosevelt believes Fala was snatched and a substitute left in his place. It seems a crackpot rival political party is trying to take over the government and ma...
-#2 of the Abe Lieberman series- The only reason I would continue to read this series is because I really like the characters and I think the author does a great job developing them. The story line in this one was not very satisfying, however. The story is about a cop who shoots his wife and he...
That down-at-the-heels gumshoe Toby Peters again proves to be "an unblemished delight," as the Washington Post Book World put it, while his creator, Stuart M. Kaminsky, continues to "make the totally wacky possible" in a zany new Hollywood adventure. Having survived the hire of such movie luminar...
Originally written in the 1970s and set in the 1940s, this mystery had a very film noir, dark and gritty atmosphere. I liked Toby as a character but I could not follow the murder mystery plot or figure out how he was solving it. I'm not sure if this was because I listened to it on audio and so I ...
I have never particularly cared for mysteries, especially murder mysteries. Stuart Kaminsky and Dorothy Sayers have changed my mind. I didn't think it was possible for a mystery author to philosophize about life and death, evil and good, as well as write an intriguing, twisting plot... Well, that...
I didn't care for this too much. He's a born loser & while it was amusing at first, it just got old & too predictable. By the half way mark, I knew what was going to happen too often. I started skipping ahead & didn't miss a thing.On the plus side, the characters were quirky - a lot of old tim...
Nice to return to a solidly written story, after another bout with a current author that was left alone by a good editor. Kaminsky does move this one very, very fast. The plot is very good, the mystery great and the characters very well done. As usual, Kaminsky nails the dialogue of the separate ...
This is the 14th Toby Peters mystery.This time Toby is trying to retrieve money and confidental papers stolen from General Douglas MacArthur.He teams up with Dashell Hammett.Milestones in this novel are Toby gets his cat, Dash, and Jeremy announces that he and his wife are expecting a baby.Unfort...
Someone wants Gary Cooper to make a movie he isn't interested in making, and whoever it is wants him badly enough to get nasty about it. Cooper takes to the hills, accompanied by a writer named Ernest Hemingway, chased by men with blood in their eyes and murder in their hearts. The problem is tha...
I generally love the Toby Peters mysteries by the late film historian, Stuart Kaminsky. Peters, as former studio guard and private detective (in the Sam Spade mode), consistently becomes involved in mysteries that involve one or more celebrities as potential victims, suspects, and/or allies. The ...
His dying was unparalleled. No one could clutch at his throat quite like George MacCready. No one’s knees buckled with the gusto of George MacCready’s. Nor could they sprawl ontheir backs, legs quivering ever so slightly, as they gasped their final breath. Only for him would the ermine trim of a ...
I opened my eyes. The sun was casting bands of dusty light through the slats of my blinds. More knocking. Not hard. Not insistent, but not giving up either. I reached for my watch, almost got it before it fell off the chair next to my bed. Then I almost fell out of the bed reaching for the watch....
He stood in front of his desk, sitting back against it, a coffee cup in his hand. His glasses were off and lying on the desk next to a brown paper bag with grease spots showing through. Next to the bag was a manila folder. I don’t like manila folders. They contain too many surprises. Viviase look...
The railroad built a station, an amusement pavilion and cement walkways along the beach. Excursions were advertised to the “Coney Island of the Pacific.” It worked, and golf courses and racetracks followed. Between 1909 and 1916, Santa Monica was regularly drawing thousands for the Santa Monica a...
Merle coughed her way through breakfast and put up a half-hearted resistance to the orange juice I forced on her. Narducy just looked at his coffee and pulled out a copy of the Chicago Times, a tabloid with a little line drawing of a camera looking at the reader at the top of the page. Merle had ...
There was no point in deluding himself. He had thought he was prepared, but he had let emotion take over, something he had been taught never to do. No, it wasn’t really emotion moving him to the kill, making him take chances. It was the high of running along the edge when he could take a safe pat...
A block away was Taylor Street, both sides of which were crowded with Italian restaurants brought back to life when Lew was a kid by the University of Illinois Chicago campus. The university had embraced the neighborhood, threatened to engulf it, and eventually came to a mutually advantageous und...
The skeleton man’s gun was out now, and my chance for a run was down to nothing. The gun was a big bulky Luger that could make a big bulky hole in a man, woman, child or tree. The house itself was badly lit even with the lights turned on. Some of the furniture was covered with sheets, as if the o...
In your hand is a handkerchief spread over the fingers of one hand. Ask someone to place the coin in the center of the handkerchief. Poke it down showing that the coin is still there. Reach over with the other hand, snap the handkerchief. The coin is gone. Show that both your hands are empty, wip...
Because if you do, you’ll be expected to keep up that standard the rest of your life. I still had my key to the old office. It was after ten and I went in as quietly as I could, groping my way in the dark past the reception room, across Shelly s parlor and into my broom-...
Plaut’s chapter gently and quietly in front of her door in the morning, I hurried to my car and drove downtown. I told Arnie the no-neck mechanic to fix the gas gauge and hurried to the office. The lobby was empty, the building was echoing and humming, and my cheek was puffy and tender, but I fel...
office building, but Alice Pallis did not hesitate. Alice feared neither man nor beast … nor robot Alice was a formidable creature of no mean proportions who, less than a year ago, when she was still in the porno business, had hoisted a two-hundred-pound printing press and carried it four flights...
The rain had started again. It wasn’t much of a rain but it was enough to hide the moon and stars and give me a feeling of protective isolation from people. Traffic going north on Tamiami Trail was light, but there was the usual cast of coastal Florida characters on the road. I passed the infirme...
The circus lights glowed yellow in the twilight over Aldreich Field, and we followed those lights like the North Star. Jeremy drove right to Emmett Kelly’s wagon and parked the car behind it. I told Agnes to stay with me, but she said she was going back to her snakes. “They’re hungry and scared,”...
The woman with Morris looked at us over her shoulder and nodded. Morris glanced at us and said, “Must be entertainment.” He grinned at us and we grinned back. We did turn out to be the entertainment, but not quite the comedy act he had in mind. In a studio full of famous faces, we held our own in...
Ann Hurwitz said, dunking one of the two biscotti I had brought her into the cappuccino I had also brought to her office. A bribe. “Seven weeks,” I said. “How do you feel about it?” “Helpless. Relieved. I’m thinking of buying a cheap car and leaving.” “Again.” “Again,” I said. “This time maybe I’...
Hanrahan said when he checked into the station a little after noon. “Just checked with the state attorney’s office.” “Can’t keep a bad man down,” Lieberman said, offering his partner a Life Saver. Hanrahan took it. They were at Hanrahan’s desk with Lieberman sucking a mint and standing with arms ...
On the way there I had stopped for a Taco and Pepsi Victory Special at Paco’s On Pico. Sergeant Veldu, the old guy on the front desk, had waved me in with a beefy hand and told me to look out for Cawelti, who was in and in a bad mood. I had known Sergeant John Cawelti for two years, since he firs...