Toby Peters, the Hollywood private eye who has previously saved the likes of Judy Garland, Gary Cooper, and the Marx Brothers, is back. This time there’s trouble under the big top, and his services are required by none other than Emmett Kelly. A circus elephant has been electrocuted and Kelly fears for his life. Toby goes undercover as a clown and becomes entangled with a cast of bizarre characters, including a 250-pound wrestler/poet, a beautiful snake charmer, an immaculately-dressed Swiss midget, and a baffling witness named Alfred Hitchcock. It’s all in a day’s work for Toby Peters, and in another fast-paced Forties-era mad-cap adventure for his fans.
Stuart M. Kaminsky (1934-2009) was one of the most prolific crime fiction authors of the last four decades. Born in Chicago, Kaminsky penned more than sixty novels over his lifetime. 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. He died in St. Louis in 2009.