Free/Bargain Cozy Mystery - September 2014

[gabby98]

(I am borrowing this from peachiekene's initial post last month)

We point out free and bargain cozy mysteries to each other, and recommend certain books that are/were free (or the opposite!).

Because Kindle freebies are easiest to find, the majority of the books listed are from Amazon, but freebies and bargains from other retailers and in other formats are more than welcome!

In case no retailer is specifically mentioned in a post, it is safe to assume it's for Amazon US.

Be aware that many freebies are only free for a day, so grab them fast!

[gabby98]

Free @ Amazon US

Dead Before Morning (Rafferty & Llewellyn cozy mystery Book 1) by Geraldine Evans
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004EYUHN8

Publication Date: January 11, 2014
Dead Before Morning
#1 of 15 in the Rafferty & Llewellyn British Detective Series

A Little Laughter. A Little Mayhem. A Little MURDER...

For readers who like cozy mysteries, humorous mysteries and police procedurals.

With his superstitious Irish nature,British Detective Joe Rafferty shouldn’t be surprised that his first murder case as a newly-promoted Essex detective is a tough one. But the murder victim, whom the media has dubbed 'The Faceless Lady', has no ID and has been bludgeoned beyond recognition. She also supposedly had no access to the secure psychiatric facility where her dead body is found. The news media has seized on the case, placing Rafferty in an unwelcome spotlight. His boss, with whom he shares a mutual loathing, would love to see him fail.

And that's not his only little difficulty. Because Detective Rafferty is cursed by a malign fate and with a large family who believe obeying the Law of the Land is optional, Rafferty capitulates to his ma's demand that he does whatever it takes to get his crooked distant cousin out of the pokey in time for his marriage to ma’s niece. Successfully accomplishing this sticky manoeuvre is sure to be challenging, but keeping it downwind of his morally stiff new partner might be a demand too far.

If Rafferty can't spring his cousin in time, his ma's liable to commit murder—his. And if the Faceless Lady's case remains unsolved, the Superintendent will black-mark his record so indelibly that his career as a detective will never recover. If he still has a career left to ruin.

'This often comic tale sharpens the appetite for more.' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

'Evans' humor seriously added to my enjoyment of her book. The series has stand out central characters and clever plots. AUNT AGATHA'S BOOKSHOP, ANN ARBOR

The first book in the quirky, not quite so Traditional British mystery series.

Rafferty & Llewellyn series

Spoiler:

Dead Before Morning #1
Down Among the Dead Men #2
Death Line #3
The Hanging Tree #4
Absolute Poison #5
Dying For You #6
Bad Blood #7
Love Lies Bleeding #8
Blood on the Bones #9
A Thrust to the Vitals #10
Death Dues #11
All the Lonely People #12
Death Dance #13
Deadly Reunion #14
Kith and Kill #15

WEBSITE/BLOG: http//geraldineevansbooks.com
(just copy and paste into your address bar)

[ATDrake]

^
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.

[peachiekene]

Originally Posted by gabby98

Free @ Amazon US

Dead Before Morning (Rafferty & Llewellyn cozy mystery Book 1) by Geraldine Evans
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004EYUHN8

Thanks!

(In addition to Smashwords)
Also free at
Kobo
GooglePlay
B&N

[ATDrake]

Free again from the author via KDP Select @ Amazon:

Death Turns A Trick : A Romantic and Humorous San Francisco Cozy by Edgar Award-winner Julie Smith, 1st in Rebecca Schwartz mystery series, originally hardcovered from Walker in 1982 and later paperbacked by Pinnacle and Ivy.

Rebecca Schwartz, nice Jewish lawyer with a few too many fantasies, is happily playing the piano in a whorehouse when she suddenly finds herself assigned to make sure a near-naked state senator escapes a police raid. That dirty job done, a lovely evening turns even more delightful when she’s picked up by the cops and spends the next two hours at the Hall of Justice. Could this day get any worse? Of Course! Guess who arrives home to find a dead hooker on her living room floor!

Handsome Parker Phillips, Rebecca’s new beau and the most attractive man she’s met in ages, is arrested for the murder. (Worse, she suspects he might actually have done it.)

On the plus side, another very attractive man is following the case--reporter Rob Burns of the San Francisco Chronicle, a possible ally. And there are other possibilities.

[pendragginp]

I'm surprised - now cozy mysteries can have whorehouses and hookers?

[BelleZora]

This blog does a great job of defining cozy mysteries:
http://www.cozy-mystery.com/Definiti...y-Mystery.html

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by pendragginp

I'm surprised - now cozy mysteries can have whorehouses and hookers?

Well, it's not that long a step from the cutesy cozy theme naming conventions to porno parody titles, so why not?

ETA: still free from the author @ Smashwords (may be price-matched elsewhere)

Never Buried by Edie Claire, 1st in the Leigh Koslow, intrepid advertising copywriter, series. Originally out from Signet in 1991; the author has generously kept this free for the past few years and I ran an MR search and didn't see it mentioned again since mid-2012, so if there's anyone new to picking up old cozies…

The truth about what happened in 1949 went to Paul Fischer's grave... Too bad his body didn't!

Advertising copywriter Leigh Koslow doesn't pack heat--just a few extra pounds. And she doesn't go looking for trouble. When she moved into her cousin Cara's refurbished Victorian house, she wasn't planning on discovering a corpse--certainly not one that had been embalmed ten years before. But as anyone in the small Pittsburgh borough of Avalon could tell her, her cousin's house has a history attached. A history dating back to two mysterious deaths in the summer of 1949.

Someone wants Leigh and Cara out of the house--someone who has something to hide. But that someone doesn't know Leigh's impetuous cousin, and when Cara digs her heels in, Leigh looks to her old college chum, local policewoman Maura Polanski, for help. But the answers the trio find only point to more questions. Were the scandalous deaths of fifty years ago really an accident and a suicide? Or were they murder?

The nearer the women get to the truth, the more desperate someone becomes. Because some secrets are better off kept. Especially when they hit close to home!

[Lynx-lynx]

Originally Posted by BelleZora

This blog does a great job of defining cozy mysteries:
http://www.cozy-mystery.com/Definiti...y-Mystery.html

Thank you for that article and link re defining cozy mysteries.

[Lynx-lynx]

Originally Posted by pendragginp

I'm surprised - now cozy mysteries can have whorehouses and hookers?

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Well, it's not that long a step from the cutesy cozy theme naming conventions to porno parody titles, so why not?

I don't think your choice fits in with the spirit of a cozy either.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by Lynx-lynx

I don't think your choice fits in with the spirit of a cozy either.

Well, the author herself has tagged it as a cozy on Smashwords, the Amazon catalogue listing places it in that category for both the old paperback and the newer e-book versions, and several of the customer reviews refer to it specifically as a cozy, so I'll be guided by them, who presumably have considerably more experience of these things than I do.

ETA: minus the Smashwords tag, the last two conditions also apply to the Julie Smith book, if that was what you meant.

[cromag]

As long as the reader is restricted to the very proper parlor and the "commerce" is handled discreetly in the abstract, I think it can qualify. Especially if the story has a strong element of irreverent humor.

(Truth in posting -- I picked this up last spring, but it's still languishing in my TBR file.)

[pendragginp]

Originally Posted by ATDrake

Well, the author herself has tagged it as a cozy on Smashwords, the Amazon catalogue listing places it in that category for both the old paperback and the newer e-book versions, and several of the customer reviews refer to it specifically as a cozy, so I'll be guided by them, who presumably have considerably more experience of these things than I do.

ETA: minus the Smashwords tag, the last two conditions also apply to the Julie Smith book, if that was what you meant.

I would think that all of the latter references might just be because the author listed it as a cozy, rather than because it actually is.

[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by pendragginp

I would think that all of the latter references might just be because the author listed it as a cozy, rather than because it actually is.

Yes, that's entirely possible.

But if the author decides to state her book is a cozy right in the subtitle and I don't see anything prominent to contradict it, such as a top-voted customer review saying something along the lines of "Good mystery, but NOT a cozy, just a regular comedic woman sleuth", then it's unfortunate that she may have chosen to fly her work under false colours to presumably attract the lucrative niche cozy market (or just be very mistaken about the varieties within the genre she writes in, which would be rather sad for an Edgar Award-winning writer who also edits a series of themed mystery anthologies*), and I'm afraid there's only so much investigative decision-making I'm willing to do before deciding which megathread a KDP Select Amazon-exclusive self-republished backlist freebie seems to best go into, sorry.

I like to trust the Gentle Reader can ultimately decide whether or not they want to get any book based on how much it appeals to their taste, even if it doesn't seem to fit the category given.

Anyway, another freebie direct from the author @ Smashwords (may be price-matched elsewhere):

Frosted Shadow by Nancy Warren, 1st in the Toni Diamond Mystery series starring a cosmetic sales rep. Warren is normally a Harlequin author, but she specifically says in the blurb included on Amazon that she considers this to be a cozy mystery, though it may perhaps lean more towards the romantic comedy side. Nothing in a quick skim of the customer reviews obviously says otherwise, and this hasn't been posted in any of the romance megathreads according to MR search, and the romance readers are usually pretty quick to find and point out dedicated romance freebies from authors they know, as they have previously for some of Warren's other books.

This appears to be one of her self-published efforts (despite the "Ambleside Publishing" name on Amazon & iTunes), but years ago, I did morbid-curiosity read one of her official Harlequin NASCAR romance freebies, Speed Dating, and mildly enjoyed it (mainly for the car-racing stuff, though the character interactions were decent and the storytelling played out well enough, as far as I can remember).

So I personally would have no hesitation about trying this one, especially since it's in a subgenre I'm much more likely to normally read. YMMV.

Meet Toni Diamond, make up artist to middle America. She's got a nose for trouble and a passion for solving mysteries. Imagine Columbo in a lavender suit. She never met a woman who wouldn't look better with a little help from the Lady Bianca line of cosmetics. But don't be fooled by appearances. Underneath the fake diamonds and the big hair is a sharp brain and a keen eye that sees the details as well as the funny side of life. When a Lady Bianca sales rep is murdered at the annual convention in Dallas, Toni is the one who notices things that some people, like sexy Detective Luke Marciano, might easily miss. Only someone who understands as much about how to make appearances deceiving could see into the mind of this killer -- a murderer who wants to give Toni a permanent makeover. Into a dead woman.

At the sales convention, Toni has to deal with her arch rival Nicole Freedman, a woman who would stab Toni in the back if it would get her the coveted top sales award. She's got her own beauty consultants to encourage, her mother who's taken Dolly Parton as her pattern and her patron saint, her daughter Tiffany, who, at sixteen, is mortified by everything her mother does. Including breathing.

In this humorous, cozy mystery, complete with a wily and entertaining amateur female sleuth, a sexy police officer, a murder or two, a little comedy and some racy scenes, a suburban cosmetics sales woman matches wits with a fiendish murderer.

* I know this because I bought one. Actually I only happen to know about Smith's own career in the first place because I'd bought said anthology because it contained a short by one of my favourite mystery writers.

[Froide]

Would a mod please correct the typo in this thread's title?