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.

Toby hunts for the man who wants to kill a fallen star of silent film As Toby Peters crouches behind a tombstone, hiding from a crazed gunman, the private eye thinks of Charlie Chaplin. A few days earlier, the pioneer of film comedy sat in Toby's office, and told him of the hundreds of people who want him dead. Beloved when his public could not hear him speak, his political leanings have made him a pariah. Right-wing radicals, the Ku Klux Klan, and...

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....

Somewhere in Israel Near the Jordan Border, 1973: On a desert road outside a small Israeli town, two Muslim families ride home in a battered van. The children joke and play. The adults argue about money, and Ali Mohammed drives nervously. The night is dark. Suddenly, the windshield of the van shatters. Conversation ceases abruptly as an automatic weapon peppers the careening vehicle, which turns on its side and skids noisily along the road. A lone...

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 terrorist at the Moscow Film Festival plots an international incident Built in the twilight of the Tsarist state, Moscow's Metropole Hotel is a poignant reminder of the decadence of the last regime. But today its corridors are musty, its rooms are dank, and now its restaurant is the scene of a quadruple murder. Four men-one American, one Japanese, and two citizens of Mother Russia-share a meal of smoked salmon, caviar, and two bottles of vodka....

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.

When the target of an extradition case in Arizona is gunned down, detective Abe Lieberman pursues the killer's identity, while priest Bill Hanrahan struggles with a racist and sexist colleague who thwarts a rape investigation.

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.

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.