Stuart M. Kaminsky

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....

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....

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....

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

Lew Fonesca is a man who does things for people....

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

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

Lew Fonesca is still a freelance process server, still has his office behind a Dairy Queen in Sarasota, and is still the friend of the poor and outcast....

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....

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....

Coffins fill the basement of a crumbling Los Angeles movie theater....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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....

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

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....