Author: Stuart M. Kaminsky
Narrator: Stephen Bowlby
Unabridged: 6 hr 10 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Highbridge Audio
Published: 07/01/2014
Categories: Fiction, Mystery & Detective
Stuart M. Kaminsky (1934-2009) was one of the most prolific crime fiction authors of the last four decades. Born in Chicago, he spent his youth immersed in pulp fiction and classic cinema-two forms of popular entertainment which he would make his life's work. After college and a stint in the army, Kaminsky wrote film criticism and biographies of the great actors and directors of Hollywood's Golden Age. In 1977, when a planned biography of Charlton Heston fell through, Kaminsky wrote Bullet for a Star, his first Toby Peters novel, beginning a fiction career that would last the rest of his life.
Kaminsky penned twenty-four novels starring the detective, whom he described as "the anti-Philip Marlowe." In 1981's Death of a Dissident, Kaminsky debuted Moscow police detective Porfiry Rostnikov, whose stories were praised for their accurate depiction of Soviet life. His other two series starred Abe Lieberman, a hardened Chicago cop, and Lew Fonseca, a process server. In all, Kaminsky wrote more than sixty novels. He died in St. Louis in 2009.
Toby Peters gets hired by no less than General Douglas MacArthur to find some embarrassing papers and a load of cash he used to pay someone off. Toby is assisted by Dashiell Hammett on the case, Dashiell is in town to get his teeth fixed by Toby's office mate, Dentist Sheldon Mink. Toby is also assi......more
A fine example of the hard boiled wise-cracking loner detective with the requisite small group of oddball associates and in this case an often prickly police contact who throws things. This one lives in a boarding house in what is probably the most interesting place/time in America. Los Angeles in t......more
Great series of books. I love the history of what it was like living in the 40s during the war.......more
These books are entertaining light reading, featuring the detective, his brother, the cop, his office mate, the absurd dentist, and the usual band of scoundrels, his ex-wife, and a new girlfriend, who we can hope will continue to be a character in the series. Not Abe Lieberman, or Porfiry Peyrovich,......more
3.5 An interesting installment in that for more-or-less the first time he addresses 20th century politics, and does so with a critical eye, through the character of an ambitious and unstable Douglas MacArthur. Which doesn't make for a particularly strong or fun plot, but makes up for that with an ev......more