There’s no one and nothing the great detective Nero Wolfe wouldn’t take on if the price was right. That’s something wealthy society widow Rachel Bruner is counting on when she writes him a check for a whopping hundred grand. But even Wolfe has a moment’s doubt when he finds out why the prize is so generous. For the oversize genius and his able assistant Archie Goodwin are about to lock horns with the FBI—and those highly trained G-men have a way with threats, tails, and bugs that could giv...

From Hollywood's Golden Age to a rock 'n' roll tragedy, this pair of detective novels from two award-winning maestros of mystery hits all the right notes.From Edgar Award–winning author Stuart M. Kaminsky, Dancing in the Dark shines a light on the 1940s Los Angeles dancing scene. Paired with Ellery Queen Award–winning author Ed Gorman's "gripping, amusing, thoughtful and hugely entertaining" The Day the Music Died, these two kooky and delightful m...

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 stitches when he receives a severed ear in the mail—a simple message from a Chicago bookie who wants $120,000, or else. Chico is baffled because, althoug...

Hollywood detective****Toby Peters does a job for one of Tinseltown’s finestIt’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—missing persons and bodyguard work, mostly—but now his old friends, the Warners, have a job for him. Someone has mailed the studio a picture of Errol Flynn caught in a compromising position with a very ...

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 find...

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 tha...

This thrilling crime novel features "the best cop to come out of the Soviet Union since Martin Cruz Smith's Arkady Renko" ( San Francisco Examiner).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, which he uses as a bargaining chip to secure exit visas for himself and his Jewish wife. But just b...

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...

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 breakdo...

Days and nights of heavy spring rain threaten to cripple New York City. Neighborhoods are experiencing periodic blackouts. People have been reported electrocuted by fallen power lines. Flooding of some subway lines has stopped trains in their tracks. And in the midst of the deluge, the CSI team has three cases to solve.Mac Taylor and Don Flack are on the trail of the perpetrator of a string of grisly murders with one thing in common: initials carved into the victims' bodies. When a...

Detective Toby Peters hunts the men who killed his ex-wife’s new husbandHeavyweight champ Joe Louis did not want to find a dead body today. After passing the afternoon with a woman who is not his wife, he’s jogging on the beach when he sees two men standing over a corpse. He raises his fists, and they run. Toby Peters is even more sorry to see the body than Louis, for in a way, the dead man is family. Toby’s ex-wife called him that morning, begging him to find her ...

Tension runs high as a Moscow cop investigates murder under the big top—from the Edgar Award–winning "Ed McBain of Mother Russia" ( Kirkus Reviews).Porfiry Rostnikov was one of the top detectives in Moscow—until he crossed the KGB. On the orders of the secret service, this bulldog cop is busted down to the minor crimes unit, where his talents are utterly wasted. When a drunk climbs the statue of Nikolai Gogol in Arbat Square and threatens to kill himself, ...