The world is a strange, sad, and wonderful place. And Moscow is at its center. Killers are running through the city - some on two legs, some on four. To lower the body count, Porfiry Rosmikov, the Moscow Police's one-legged inspector, will have to move faster than anybody. Stalwarts of the Russian Mafia who live by the sword are finally dying by it. One is found naked and shot in the Moscow River, others floating in pools at the city's poshest hotels....

Harry Blackstone's reputation as a first-class illusionist is threatened when a series of murders implicates him, forcing the frustrated magician to turn to Hollywood detective Toby Peters for help in nabbing the killer.

Chief inspector of the Moscow Police, Porfiry Rostnikov, works on three seemingly unrelated cases: a missing cosmonaut possesses secrets that are not safe to keep, a filmmaker's epic of the life of Tolstoy is held for ransom by a demented chess fanatic, and a leader of a center for paranormal research is murdered.

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...

When his longtime friend Sheldon Minck is arrested for the murder of his estranged wife, Mildred, private detective Toby Peters is hired by film legend Joan Crawford to solve the crime and prevent negative publicity from tarring her name.

A movie extra is found dead on the Gone With the Wind set and five years later, Clark Gable, a possible witness to the murder, begins receiving death threats and enlists the aid of an investigator.

Scratching out a living as a process server in Sarasota, Florida, four years after the hit-and-run death of his wife in Chicago, Lew Fonesca returns to his hometown, determined to uncover the truth about the "accident" that claimed his wife's life.

Investigator Lew Fonesca tackles a pair of linked cases involving an elderly woman who swears against all evidence that she has witnessed a murder in her retirement home and a hit-and-run accident that has killed a fourteen-year-old boy.

Intrepid detective Lew Fonesca must once again help Adele, the runaway he saved previously, when she becomes involved with a reclusive best-selling author and several priceless manuscripts vanish, a situation that results in betrayal and murder.

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.