A hotel murder involves Toby Peters with one of Hollywood's toughest stars.Toby Peters wakes up with a headache, a gun in his face, and a body on the hotel-room bed. He is less surprised by the gun than by the man holding it: Marion Morrison, a.k.a John Wayne. Both of them were lured here by the dead man. The next arrival is a prostitute named Olivia, and hot on her heels is the house detective, who's come to check on the commotion in Room 303.Reasoning that nobody knows all four of them besides the desk clerk, Teddy, the two detectives haul Teddy upstairs, where he confesses to the murder. Wayne, Peters, and Olivia all have careers to protect, so the house detective agrees to keep their names out of it. It all seems too simple. As he looks into the murder, Toby finds that powerful people want to stop him from learning what happened while he was sleeping in Room 303.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.
