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Start giftingFall of a Cosmonaut
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Learn moreWith his Edgar Award–winning series about a Moscow cop, "Kaminsky's a master of tone, maintaining the edgy excitement of suspense" (The Washington Post).
In the 1960s, Russian children wanted to be cosmonauts like Yuri Gagarin, the first human in space. But the Soviet Union is history, and Gagarin's glory is long gone. For the men and women aboard the decaying Mir space station, life is an unending series of near-disasters. During one such breakdown, cosmonaut Tsimion Vladovka asks ground control to contact Moscow police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov if anything happens to him.
The cosmonaut returns to Earth safely, but a year later he goes missing and his former crew members start turning up dead. Vladovka was in possession of state secrets, so there's also a potential security risk. He must be found, dead or alive. In the days of the USSR, no one could navigate the bureaucratic maze of the Kremlin like Rostnikov—but he's never encountered anything like the labyrinth that is Star City, home of the Russian space program. Still, the veteran policeman is convinced: The answer to what happened to the cosmonaut on Earth lies in something that happened in space.
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.