Free (Kindle DRM-free) Return to Sender [1980s Jewish Sleuth Berlin Travel Mystery]

[ATDrake]

Return to Sender by Dick Cluster (Fantastic Fiction) is the 1st novel in his Alex Glauberman series of retro-contemporary (circa the 1980s) murder mystery starring a Jewish auto mechanic turned private investigator, this installment setting him up with his first amateur case which leads him to the eventual professional career, a globe-trotting adventure which sees him drawn to London and Berlin near the fall of the Wall, as a well-intentioned offer to mail a package for a stranger leads him on a trail to clear his name for murder, as you do, while uncovering the various secrets of parties involved, free for a limited time courtesy of the author himself via backlist author republishing consortium BooksBNimble (run by Edgar Award-winning author Julie Smith, who's been very generous about offering us the freebies of her own books).

This was originally published in 1988 by Dutton.

Currently free and DRM-free @ B&N & Amazon & Kobo (generally available worldwide, YMMV if the price-matching hasn't kicked in for your locale)

Description
This is the FIRST book in the critically acclaimed Alex Glauberman series.

HE WENT TO THE POST OFFICE…AND ENDED UP IN BERLIN
Meet reluctant detective Alex Glauberman—just a guy who fixes foreign cars, a 41-year-old divorced father with a brilliant British girl friend. But he’s got a complication right now—he’s trying to survive chemo. And then Gerald Meyer, a stranger he meets at the P.O., asks him to mail a package to Meyer’s daughter. Easily done, but too late, Meyer changes his mind.

And turns up dead.

But now the package is gone, and clearly dangerous! Will Meyer’s daughter be the next victim? Worse, is Alex about to be arrested for murder? Out of those fears is born Alex’s career as an international detective—because the stranger’s daughter lives in Berlin, and he doesn’t know how to contact her.

Too intrigued to let it go (and also because he’s a mensch) Alex sets off on an adventure that takes him to London and Berlin in the last years of the Wall, in a search for package, perpetrators, and to prove his own innocence.

Along the way he’s plunged into the wreckage of Gerald Meyer’s life, a wake that includes the daughter, half-German and half-Jewish, as well as an underworld network, unusual banking transactions, blackmail, shadowy neo-Nazis, and a city in which, as Meyer’s daughter puts it, “Under all the showy stuff, Berliners are frightened of so many things.” Police detectives in two countries don’t make it any easier, but Alex learns to cope, trading bits of information while explaining his actions with metaphors such as the Yiddish meaning of his family name.

Great scenes in Berlin make this a must-read for fans of international mysteries and thrillers, and World War II buffs will appreciate the historical aspects. Fans of Jewish detectives like Rabbi Small, Jake Samson, Rebecca Schwartz, Peter Decker, and Rina Lazarus will find themselves adding another series to their favorites. But it’s a great P.I. story for all mystery fans, in the vein of vintage male sleuths who are neither cozy nor hard-boiled—just regular detective guys, like Ellery Queen, Father Brown, Gideon Oliver, Charles Paris, and Tubby Dubonnet.

[ATDrake]

Turns out this is not actually KDP, but being done via regular old price-matching to promotional freebieization @ B&N & Kobo. Linkage in OP.