This image is the cover for the book Always Say Goodbye, The Lew Fonesca Mysteries

Always Say Goodbye, The Lew Fonesca Mysteries

From the Edgar Award–winning author, a novel of danger, despair, and determination with “an incredibly taut plot that keeps twisting back on itself” (Mystery Scene).

Four years ago Lew Fonesca’s wife was struck and killed in a hit-and-run within sight of their apartment. He fled Chicago, driving mindlessly until his car gave up the ghost in Sarasota, FL. Working from a cheap office behind the Dairy Queen on Highway 301, he makes a threadbare living as a process server and savors his clinical depression like a fine wine.

Life’s a sneaky mistress, though, and has a way of suckering you into caring. Lew’s found that he’s really good at helping people get out of bad situations. That he matters. And Lew’s therapist, who alternately acts as his conscience and his sparring partner, tells him that unless he’s willing to leave the planet, it’s about time that he goes back to Chicago and closes the door to the past so he can finally get on with the rest of his life. Lew hates to admit it, but he’s beginning to see her point.

So Lew returns to his hometown, to friends and family . . . and to a grief that threatens to engulf him. He’s resolved to dig until he finds out who killed his wife. In doing so, he’ll uncover both sweet and painful memories of his past. He’ll also confront a murderer who’ll not hesitate to kill again to make sure secrets stay buried . . .

“Will] keep readers hurtling along to the very end.” —Publishers Weekly

“A psychologically acute and fast-moving crime series.” —Booklist

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