A hotel murder and a $10,000 charity heist involve Toby Peters with two prominent Hollywood clients—John Wayne and Charlie Chaplin.

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 show trial, and there is no doubt he will be convicted and executed, yet before he dies, he intends to tell the truth one more time. But this is Moscow, where death is never hero...

Mildred Minck is an unremarkable woman—until one tragic night in June 1944 when she becomes the first citizen of Los Angeles to be murdered by crossbow. The prime suspect is her husband, dentist Sheldon Minck, who's found standing over her body with the weapon in hand, raving that only Joan Crawford can identify the killer. It seems like a natural insanity defense, but Sheldon wants his neighbor, private investigator Toby Peters, to prove his innocence. The dentist is telling the truth abo...

Three years ago, Lew Fonseca quit his job as a process server with the State's Attorney's office in Cook County, Illinois, and headed for Key West. Sidetracked by fate when his car broke down in Sarasota, Florida, he decided to stick around, making ends meet by doing some investigative work for local attorneys. Asked to locate the missing wife of a well-known local entrepreneur, Lew learns that finding Melanie Sebastian is anything but simple. With the help of a few dependable friends, he ...

Handcuffed to a dead man, Lieberman vows to take on the Chicago mob.Thirty-three years ago, Connie Gower decided to raise hell in a synagogue. Drunk, armed, and out for revenge, he came to hunt down Abe Lieberman, a young cop he believed had killed his brother in a shoot-out. Lieberman takes him down, unafraid to return fire. Since then, Gower has had few run-ins with the law, even as he made a name for himself as one of the Chicago mob's most feared contract kille...

Life has been strange ever since Toby Peters got a call from Salvador Dalí’s wife. Peters was happy to look into the theft of three of Dalí’s paintings, but he had no idea the investigation might end with his face being literally turned into something resembling abstract art.

This Chicago cop drama is "jam-packed with the stuff of good crime fiction—character, style, place, recognizable human conflict" (The Washington Post).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.Now veteran cops Abe Lieberman and Bill Hanrahan need to protect their witness from himself while they tu...

When a cop snaps, he threatens to take a building full of people with him.Bernie Shepard comes home with a shotgun. He opens the door to his bedroom, and sees what he expected -- his wife in bed with another cop. Two pumps of the shotgun take care of them, and Shepard carries out the rest of his plan. Accompanied by his nameless dog, this half-mad young detective goes to the roof of his apartment building, where he has built a small fortress stocked with food, wate...

Following the trail of Mae West’s scandalous—and missing—memoirs soon leads P.I. Peters into the midst of murder and mayhem.

In the faltering Soviet Union, the KGB will do anything to hold on to power .A Jewish man in a squalid government flat finds a killer in his shower. A young punk girl hurtles naked through the window of her apartment. And in the Crimea, at a health retreat for mid-level functionaries, an aging policeman's death is made to look like heart failure. It's this last murder that catches Porfiry Rostnikov's attention. The inspector's wife is recovering from brain surgery,...

A circus stakeout puts Toby Peters at the bottom of the food chain.The gorilla doesn't like clowns. Normally that wouldn't bother Toby Peters, since detective work tends to keep him far away from animal cages, but tonight he's dressed as a clown and locked in with the ape. The animal's handler told him not to worry -- gorillas don't eat people. They just like to tear their arms and legs off. What the ape doesn't understand is that Peters is here for his protection....

With his wife in the hospital, Porfiry Rostnikov tries to protect Moscow from chaos.Porfiry and Sarah Rostnikov have been in love since the end of World War II, growing old together as the Soviet Union lurches towards modernity. Sarah is recovering from a brain operation, her police inspector husband at her side, when a bearlike man staggers into her hospital room. Hulking, naked, and insensible, he is about to leap out the window when Rostnikov talks him off the l...