**Toby Peters gets caught between a pair of Peter Lorres**

Hollywood detective Toby Peters is asleep on his floor when the trouble starts. The dentist who shares his office calls, wailing that his wife has left him. Toby is shocked that a woman as unpleasant as Mildred could attract a suitor. Even more surprising is the name of the alleged Lothario: Peter Lorre, the scaly-voiced, bug-eyed Hollywood villain. Though he can’t imagine why the dentist would want her back, Toby agrees to track down his missing wife.

He finds Lorre in a greasy spoon near the Warner Brothers’ lot, but the actor doesn’t know a thing about missing Mildred. Her boyfriend turns out to be a Peter Lorre impersonator, and by the time Toby finds him, he’s doing a passable imitation of a dead man. The bullet was meant for the real Lorre, who has just become Toby’s client—whether he likes it or not.

**

### Review

“Reminiscent of Chandler.” —*Publishers Weekly*

“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*

### About the Author

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.