Stuart M. Kaminsky
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Lovable everyman Lew Fonesca, the man who makes things work in Sarasota, takes on the cases of seventeen-year-old Ronnie Graeill accused of bludgeoning to death a local curmudgeon who has been campaigning to end state-sponsored school funding and a semi-retired and much beloved singer of children's songs who is being blackmailed.
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When a witness's son is kidnapped, Chicago's gangland erupts into chaos Once a college football star, Bill Hanrahan has had a hard time of it ever since his bad knees kept him out of the pros. He became a homicide detective with the unfortunate reputation of losing witnesses and loving the bottle. Now Hanrahan is off the sauce, and working a job that should be straightforward: He's guarding a mob informant's ex-wife and teenage son while they tour...
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A huckster repeatedly robs a comedian, leading Toby on a cross-country chase The bank accounts are in the names of men like Otis J. Raisincluster, Quigley E. Sneersight, and Cormorant Beecham, but any comedy connoisseur knows that names that nonsensical could come only from the twisted brain of W. C. Fields. When toiling on the vaudeville circuit, the acid-tongued comic actor opened a new account in every town he played, adding up to a mountain of...
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Toby tries to clear a dentist accused of a medieval murder Though an otherwise unremarkable woman, Mildred Minck has the distinction of being the first citizen of Los Angeles to be murdered by crossbow. The police find her dentist husband, Sheldon, standing over the body with the weapon, swearing that only Joan Crawford can identify the real killer. An insanity defense seems a natural fit, but Sheldon wants his neighbor, private investigator Toby...
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Carl Zwick is an aging Chicago Cubs baseball player. Sometimes he feels like he's spent his life hitting into double plays, but he's finally gotten onto the right track. Then tragedy strikes him out.
Anita Mills is a pretty single black mother just trying to get by. A random act of brutality in one of Chicago's rougher neighborhoods permanently ends her struggle.
Richard Allen Smith walks the streets of ChiTown saying God has sent him. He has an...
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Handcuffed to a dead man, Lieberman vows to take on the Chicago mob Thirty-three years ago, Connie Gower decided to raise hell in a synagogue. Drunk, armed, and out for revenge, he came to hunt down Abe Lieberman, a young cop he believed had killed his brother in a shoot-out. Lieberman takes him down, unafraid to return fire. Since then, Gower has had few run-ins with the law, even as he made a name for himself as one of the Chicago mob's most feared...
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A Moscow cop juggles cases of kidnapping, murder, and a missing Czarist-era document in a modern-day mystery with never a dull moment.
In the waning days of the Russian Empire, the Czar inked a secret treaty with Japan that was stolen en route by one of the workmen on the Trans-Siberian Railway. More than a one hundred years later, the Soviet Union has gone the way of the Czardom, and police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov is trying to find his way in...
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Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov travels to Siberia to investigate a murder at a diamond mine, where he discovers an old secret...and an even older personal problem. His compatriots head to Kiev on a trail of smuggled diamonds and kidnapped guest workers....and what they discover leads them to a vast conspiracy that not only has international repercussions but threatens them on a very personal level.
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Four years ago Lew Fonesca's wife was struck and killed in a hit-and-run within sight of their apartment. He fled Chicago, driving mindlessly until his car gave up the ghost in Sarasota, FL. Working from a cheap office behind the Dairy Queen on Highway 301, he makes a threadbare living as a process server and savors his clinical depression like a fine wine. Then his therapist, who alternately acts as his conscience and his sparring partner, tells...
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Sometimes fools must step in where Fred Astaire fears to tap.
Luna Martin, the moll of a well-known Los Angeles gangster nicknamed "Fingers" (because he likes to cut them off), has demanded dance lessons from Hollywood's finest hoofer-and whatever Luna wants, Luna gets.
To sidestep the flirtations of the lead-footed lady, Astaire hires private investigator Toby Peters to pose as a dance instructor and take over the lessons. But when someone cuts...
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Inspector Porfiry Petrovich Rostnikov, an honest policeman in a very dishonest post-Soviet Union, and his team search for a serial killer who has claimed at least 40 victims while protecting a visiting British journalist who is working on a story about a Moscow prostitution ring that produces leads to a high-level source seemingly beyond Rostnikov's reach.
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Frankly, a killer doesn't give a damn about offing Clark Gable-or Toby Peters-in this fast-paced and colorful addition to a very successful series
On December 10, 1938, Atlanta burned again. In the back lot at David O. Selznick's studio, sets from a dozen old pictures were pushed together and set ablaze to provide a backdrop for the climax of what Selznick promised to be the movie of the century: Gone with the Wind. Toby Peters, then just a studio...
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In this mystery introducing a hard-boiled Soviet police inspector.
Aleksander Granovsky has dedicated his life to exposing the brutality of the Russian penal system. In two days he will be tried for the crime of smuggling essays to the West. It is a show trial, and there is no doubt he will be convicted and executed, yet before he dies, he intends to tell the truth one more time. But this is Moscow, where death is never heroic. While writing his...
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The final Toby Peters Hollywood whodunit from the Edgar Award-winning author is a marvelous magic trick of a mystery featuring Harry Blackstone.
When an anonymous rival demands that master illusionist Harry Blackstone reveal his secrets on stage or die, the magician hires Toby Peters and his brother, ex-cop Phil Pevsner, to run security for his show at the famous Pantages Theater in Hollywood. Of course, Peters doesn't expect the job to include replacing...
15) Poor butterfly
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The year 1942 is a bad time to stage Madame Butterfly. Although Puccini's masterpiece is a perennial favorite of the San Francisco opera crowd, its sympathetic depiction of a Japanese girl causes tension in the dark months following Pearl Harbor. Newspaper editorialists rage against the production, opera buffs picket the theater, and a note appears nailed to the house door, threatening violence against the cast and crew. When the first workman dies,...
20) The killers
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Criterion collection volume 176
Physical Desc
2 videodiscs (102 min., 94 min.) : sound, black and white, color ; 4 3/4 in. + 1 folded-out insert.
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Ernest Hemingway's simple but gripping short tale "The Killers" is a model of economical storytelling. Two directors adapted it into unforgettably virile features: Robert Siodmak, in a 1946 film that helped define the noir style; and Don Siegel, in a brutal 1964 version that was intended for television but deemed too violent for home audiences and released theatrically instead. The first is poetic and shadowy, the second direct and harsh as daylight,...