^
Actually a long-term Smashwords freebie which can found multi-format available worldwide here:
Dead Before Morning
Free from the author via KDP Select for maybe the next day or so (they've already used of 3 of their 5 days per 90 allotment, IIRC) @
Amazon:
Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery by Shelley Singer, 1st in the Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente series, originally out from St. Martin's Press in 1983.
Samson's Deal is the FIRST cozy mystery in the Jake Samson and Rosie Vicente detective series by award-winning author Shelley Singer.
MURDER, POLITICS, AND STRANGE BEDFELLOWS...
Ex-Chicago-cop Jake Samson is tired of the rat race. He's living in laid back Oakland, California with a couple of cats and just enough savings to eat canned oysters and accept collect calls from his bemused parents, when an old friend--a progressive political science processor--calls with an enticing offer. Seems the professor's wife was found dead in the backyard of their Berkeley home, and he wants to pay Jake ten thousand dollars (plus expenses) to figure out whodunit.
The police pick up the usual leads; jealousy, dirty politics, and an estate worth killing for. Naturally, since the professor is the dead woman's spouse, he's the primary suspect. Samson doesn't like the guy much, but the case heats up—quite literally—when the professor's office is set afire by a radical right wing activist group, of which, it turns out, the wife was a member.
With his good friend Rosie, and her justice-dispensing two-by-four, Samson follows a twisted trail leads through the Bay Area's bizarre cultural labyrinth; from pop meditation ashrams to neo-Nazi rallies, to the startling, but all too human truth.