Bullet for a Star

Hollywood detective Toby Peters does a job for one of Tinseltown's finest 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-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 young girl. Although Flynn insists it's a fake, the studio is taking no chances. Toby is to deliver the blackmailer $5,000 and return with the photo negative. It should be simple, but Flynn, a swashbuckler on and off the screen, has a way of making things complicated. Though he isn't impressed by movie stars, if Toby Peters isn't careful he may end up dying for one. "Reminiscent of Chandler." -Publishers Weekly "Peters is a good guy with a sense of humor, and every appearance he makes is a welcome one." -Booklist "Marvelously entertaining." -Newsday "Kaminsky came to detective fiction from academia, but the ease of his prose was anything but academic." -The Guardian "If you like your mysteries Sam Spade tough, with tongue-in-cheek and a touch of the theatrical, then the Toby Peters series is just your ticket." -Houston Chronicle "Kaminsky has a delightfully original mind enriching-rather than just borrowing from-an old literary form." -Los Angeles Times "Makes the totally wacky possible . . . Peters [is] an unblemished delight." -The Washington Post 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.