"Vengeance" by Stuart M. Kaminsky, published by Forge, A Tom Doherty Associates Book, New York, stated First Edition, September, 1999, First Printing with '1' present in the line on the copyright page. Price un-clipped dust jacket.

Original dust jacket with embossed lettering on the front cover, black hard board with golden lettering on spine; 5.3/4" x 8.1/2"; 254 pages, near fine condition.

"As always, Kaminsky's sense of place is faultless, and he skillfully captures a parade of lively, credible characters, including psychiatrists, truck drivers, pimps, teenagers and social workers. With an early hook, he grabs readers and takes them on a memorably tumultuous ride of violent dips and turns, careening from Sarasota's most squalid shacks to its richest condos."

Lew Fonseca was a process server for the state attorney's office in Cook County, Illinois. Then his wife died, and Lew, unable to bear living his former life without his mate, drove south until his car died in a Dairy Queen parking lot in Sarasota, Florida. Now he squeezes out a living as a freelance process server and avoids his emotions as much as possible. One of his lawyer's wealthy clients, Carl Sebastian, hires Lew to conduct a discreet inquiry into the disappearance of his trophy wife, Melanie. At the same time Lew picks up the search for a teenage runaway who may have been sold to the local vice king by her abusive father.

Fonseca is a decent, troubled man hoping to recover his emotional focus, in part by forcing himself to care more for his clients than he does for himself. Kaminsky surrounds him with a unique, carefully drawn cast of secondary characters, including a seventysomething former rancher who is handy with guns and lives by the code of the Old West. [a review]

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.

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