To salvage his career, Rostnikov takes on a baffling bathroom murderAfter a lifetime in service to the Soviet Union, police inspector Porfiry Rostnikov may have found a way out. A high-profile homicide leads him to a cache of documents packed full of incriminating Kremlin gossip, which he uses as a bargaining chip to secure exit visas for himself and his wife. But just before the deal closes, Brezhnev's death sends the nation into turmoil, and dooms Rostnikov's escape. His career derailed, the veteran cop is reduced to investigating penny-ante murders—the latest of which may lead somewhere very big indeed.An elderly Jewish man has been shot to death in his bathtub, an incomprehensible killing committed in sight of his two children. And as a brutal Moscow summer wears on, the police themselves become outright targets for car thieves and snipers. With the help of his two faithful lieutenants, Karpo and Tkach, the limping detective will need to find a way to solve...

When his nephew is killed by a mugger, Lieberman will do anything to bring his family justiceIn a posh part of Chicago's North Side, two Trinidadian men look for someone to jump. Waiting outside an apartment building, they see a couple shivering in the cold as they make their way to their car. The Trinidadians draw guns, demand moneyand quickly go too far. Shots ring out, and the muggers run. Behind them, the man is dead, and his pregnant wife lays bleeding in the street. The murder victim is the nephew of Abe Lieberman, one of the most dignified cops in Chicago homicide. When he learns of the killing, Lieberman's calm faade cracks. As he works with his partner, Bill Hanrahan, to find the killers, Lieberman makes a pact with the devilready to sacrifice everything if it means finding the men who gunned his nephew down in the street.

To avenge a long-ago death, a killer puts Toby Peters in his sights On December 10, 1938, Atlanta burned again. In the back lot at David O. Selznick's studio, sets from a dozen old pictures were pushed together and set alight to provide a backdrop for the climax of what Selznick promised to be the movie of the century: Gone with the Wind. Toby Peters, then just a studio security guard, was on hand to help keep the dozens of Confederate extras in line. When the fire was over, he found one of them dead, impaled on his own sword.   Five years later, Toby scratches out a living as a private detective for Hollywood's finest, several of whom have just been marked for death. On the back of a cryptic poem is a list of names of men who were on the scene the night the extra died. Two are already dead. One is Clark Gable. The other is Toby himself.