Never Cross a Vampire: (5 Toby Peters Mysteries)

The stakes are life and death when Bela Lugosi is threatened in this "affectionate parody of the hard-boiled private-eye" genre (The New York Times). 1942: In the basement of a crumbling Los Angeles movie palace, five vampires crowd around Bela Lugosi. They should not frighten the fading horror icon, who found worldwide fame as Dracula, for these are only wannabes--diehard fans who get their kicks dressing up as bloodsuckers. But Lugosi is terrified, because he knows that one of these crackpots has been making threats against his life. Their fangs may be plastic, but their lethal intentions are all too real. For protection, Lugosi hires Hollywood private eye Toby Peters, who's splitting his time between this case and a job for his old employers: the Warner brothers. A Hollywood murder has been linked to one of the studio's star screenwriters: the brilliant novelist and violent drunk, William Faulkner. To his horror, Peters finds a connection between the two cases. To get Faulkner off the hook, he'll have to find out who wants to close the coffin lid on Dracula. With "shades of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett" Edgar Award-winning author Stuart Kaminsky's 1940s Hollywood PI is once again cracking wise and saving celebrities from psychos (The San Diego Union-Tribune).

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.

Review :
"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