Kaminsky's first three series feature 1940's Los Angeles PI Toby Peters, Russian police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov and takes place in Moscow, and Chicago police detective Abe Lieberman.
I was introduced to Kaminsky's work when I purchase an abridged version of Lieberman's Thief several years ago. Despite much interst in mysteries, I had until then, overlooked Kaminsky. I so thoroughly enjoyed Lieberman's Thief, that I went in search of other books in the series. I was unable to find more of the Lieberman series at the time, but discovered the Toby Peters series of which there are twenty volumes.
Toby Peters seems to be a bumbling PI in the 1940's big studio days of Hollywood. Despite seeming to be inept and on the edge of the financial ruin that plagues all hard boiled PI's he is constantly in the employ of such mega stars as Mae West, Errol Flynn and W.C. Fields. The entire Toby Peters series is a delightful and often funny romp through antics which could only be found in Tinseltown. In the latest book in the series, A Fatal Glass of Beer, Peters teams up with W.C. Fields for a cross country trek to find money which is being systematically stolen from banks where Fields stashed it under outrageous names during his vaudville days. Peters and Fields follow the thief, always a step behind him, as he withdraws the money. What seems like a farcical, but predictable journey has surprising and often amusing twists and turns which hold your intrest from first page to last. The fifteenth book in the series, Poor Butterfly was nominated for a Shamus award.
The series featuring Porfiry Rostnikov is pretty much a straight forward police procedural series but with a twist from the beginning; all of the action takes place in the then Soviet Union, now former Soviet Union (maybe someone should write a mystery series about the artist formerly known as Prince). I have only read one of Rostnikov series, The Man Who Walked Like a Bear was published in 1990 while the Soviet Union was under the reign of Gorbechev and still very much under the watchful eyes of the KGB. Rostnikov heads a small investigative force in Moscow which is charged with looking into small non political situations. Rostnikov's little band ends up stumbling on larger crimes with higher political implication, but manage to solve them without treading on the toes of, or threatening the jurisdiction of the KGB.
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