The Devil Met a Lady

Protecting a starlet from kidnappers gets Toby Peters kidnapped himself. For Hollywood private eye Toby Peters, hell is Bette Davis. After two days locked in a hotel room with the Oscar-winning diva, her ice-queen persona and witty repartee are driving him mad. He's there on behalf of her husband Albert Farnsworth, an aeronautics engineer with a head full of government secrets. Blackmailers are threatening his wife, demanding plans for America's new long-range bomber. Always eager to help out Uncle Sam, Toby hides Bette in a fleabag motel. After forty-eight hours together he's fantasizing about killing his client. As it turns out, someone may do it for him. The thugs track them to the hotel and escort them out at gunpoint. He'll have to crack the spy ring fast, lest this be Bette's - and his - final performance. About the Author. Stuart 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. Kaminsky 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. Review quote. "Kaminsky stands out as a subtle historian, unobtrusively but entertainingly weaving into the story itself what people were wearing, eating, driving, and listening to on the radio. A page-turning romp." - Booklist. "For anyone with a taste for old Hollywood B-movie mysteries, Edgar winner Kaminsky offers plenty of nostalgic fun . . . The tone is light, the pace brisk, the tongue firmly in cheek." - Publishers Weekly. "Marvelously entertaining." - Newsday. "Makes the totally wacky possible . . . Peters [is] an unblemished delight." - Washington Post. "The Ed McBain of Mother Russia." - Kirkus Reviews.