Catch a Falling Clown

Stuart M. Kaminsky

Dec 2011 · The Toby Peters Mysteries Book 7 · Open Road Media

About this ebook

A hard-boiled Hollywood PI has to work without a net to save Emmett Kelly from a killer who’s not clowning around: “Nostalgic fun” (Publishers Weekly).
 
In February 1942, Californians may be living in fear of a Japanese attack, but the show must go on. The circus is in town—unfortunately so is a killer saboteur who’s targeting the star attractions. Private detective Toby Peters is no stranger to going undercover, but this is the first time his disguise will include a red nose.
 
The killer has already electrocuted an elephant, and hobo clown Emmett Kelly has had a close brush with death. The second-rate circus in this sleepy coastal town seems like another world from Peters’s usual Hollywood beat, but of all people, Alfred Hitchcock, the director of Suspicion, is under suspicion. With the investigation on the verge of becoming a three-ring circus, it’s up to Toby Peters to cage the killer before anyone else meets a bad end under the big top.
 
Edgar Award winner Stuart M. Kaminsky’s “Toby Peters series [is] a delight . . . Written with more than a dash of humor” and this big-top murder mystery is a “fun, lightweight book for all mystery fans” (Library Journal).

About the author

DIVStuart 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./divDIV /divDIVKaminsky 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./div