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.