This image is the cover for the book Midnight Pass, The Lew Fonesca Mysteries

Midnight Pass, The Lew Fonesca Mysteries

Edgar Award–Winning Author: A downhearted detective deals with missing persons and murder in the “psychologically acute and fast-moving crime series” (Booklist).

Lew Fonesca is a guy just trying to get along. When his wife died in a senseless auto wreck, he got up and left his old life—and when his car gave out in sunny Sarasota, Florida, he stayed. He takes small process-serving gigs and various odd jobs helping people out, and he tries, although maybe not as hard as he should, to fix the gaping hole in his heart.

But for a man who just wants to ease through life without any complications, Lew has a pretty full plate. The shrink he’s been seeing for over a year wants him to finally dump all the grief he’s carrying around so he can have more than a half-life. And Sally, the pretty single mom and social worker who’s helped Lew in the past, wants to deepen their friendship. On top of that, a local minister asks him to find a town council member who’s gone missing just before a crucial vote that could ruin a struggling community, and a distraught father comes to Lew to track down his wife and two kids, who Lew suspects ran off with the man’s best friend.

When people start showing up dead, Lew knows he’s in way over his head—and this time he may not be able make it all come out okay. . . .

“There are three things we’ve come to expect from a Kaminsky story: superb plotting, real-world dialogue and character development. He doesn’t place a foot wrong in any of these departments in Midnight Pass.” —Sarasota Herald-Tribune

“Good dark fun.” —Chicago Tribune

Stuart M. Kaminsky

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. 

Tom Doherty Associates