Stuart M. Kaminsky

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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-'90s, and capitalism and privatization have come to Russia. As the trickle of cash turns to a torrent, bureaucrats become...

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 40 women so far, Police...

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...

The first in a mystery series set in 1940s Hollywood, where a hard-boiled private eye helps a cast of real-life stars: "Nostalgic fun" (Publishers Weekly). 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...

In this mystery introducing a hard-boiled Soviet police inspector, "Kaminsky gets Russia right" (Ed McBain). 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...

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. And then there is the problem of protecting a visiting British journalist who is working on a story about a...

The year 1942 is a bad time to stage Madame Butterfly. Although Puccini's masterpiece is a perennial favorite of the San Francisco opera crowd, its sympathetic depiction of a Japanese girl causes tension in the dark months following Pearl Harbor. Newspaper editorialists rage against the...

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. Across the room, a dead man lies on the bed, his killer pounding on the hotel room door...

As a hard-boiled Hollywood PI enlists Al Capone's help to save the Marx Brothers, Kaminsky "makes the totally wacky possible" (The Washington Post). 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...

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...

Coffins fill the basement of a crumbling Los Angeles movie theater. Five vampires crowd around fading horror idol Bela Lugosi, peppering him with questions. A malfunctioning plastic fang causes one of the undead-wannabes to lisp. The effect is less than fearsome, but Lugosi is terrified, for one...

An Edgar Award-winning author steals the show again in "a beautifully calibrated mix of wit, suspense, and quiet honesty" (The Washington Post Book World). 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...

Frankly, a killer doesn't give a damn about offing Clark Gable - or Toby Peters - in this "fast-paced and colorful addition to a very successful series" (Publishers Weekly). On December 10, 1938, Atlanta burned again. In the back lot at David O. Selznick's studio, sets from a dozen old pictures...