The Howard Hughes Affair

A counter-espionage job leads to Toby Peters facing the barrel of a gun. After midnight, NBC Studios is as quiet as a grave. For Toby Peters, it may as well be a sealed coffin. He came on a stakeout, and has spent hours in the dark of a television soundstage waiting for the appearance of a man with a silenced pistol. The killer has already taken three lives, and Peters's may be the next. After a long wait, Peters's dulled reflexes let the gunman get the drop on him. A frantic chase through the deserted studio leaves Peters shoeless, gunless, and out of ideas. Finally the killer corners him and prepares to fire. The stakeout was Howard Hughes's idea. Earlier that week, the aviation magnate hired Peters to investigate the theft of top-secret blueprints from his home. What starts as counter-espionage turns into a murder investigation, and Peters finds himself in the uncomfortable role of murderer's bait. 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.