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

Retribution, The Lew Fonesca Mysteries

PI and process-server Lew Fonesca returns in a “nail-biting missing-persons case” from the Edgar Award–winning author of Vengeance (Booklist).

Stuart M. Kaminsky, the veteran author of more than forty novels and the creator of such wonderful characters as Abe Lieberman, Toby Peters, and Inspector Rostnikov, has created a new PI: Lew Fonesca, a world-weary guy who got in a car and just started driving after his wife died and wound up in front of a Dairy Queen in Sarasota, Florida.

He now makes his way amid bail jumpers and lost wives, people who want to be found and those who will do anything to stay under their rock. He spends his days solving cases both big and small and trying to get by, while attempting to figure out how to make the rest of his life make sense.

Retribution not only picks up where the first novel in the series, Vengeance, left off, but raises the bar big-time. Lew has solved his share of cases, and most of them—to his pride—have wound up having happy endings; in Vengeance, he saved a young runaway who has had a childhood nobody should ever have, and she finally seems to be turning her life around. But when she becomes involved with a reclusive bestselling author and several valuable manuscripts disappear, Lew knows that young Melanie is in way over her head. And if he doesn’t act fast, not only could a few reputations get tarnished—the bodies might start piling up.

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