#dick cluster

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Save the date: Friday Oct. 5th 7:00 pm, Brookline, MA

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[Free eBook UPDATE] Return to Sender by Dick Cluster [1980s Jewish Travel Murder Mystery]

Return to Sender by Dick Cluster is the 1st novel in his Alex Glauberman series of retro-contemporary (circa the 1980s) murder mystery, free for a limited time courtesy of the author himself via backlist author republishing consortium BooksBNimble.

This was originally published in 1988 by Dutton. The series stars a Jewish auto mechanic turned globe-trotting private investigator, taking place during the late 1980s when the series was originally written, and apparently this case has further historical elements tying back to WWII.

This first case gets him involved in the crime-solving business, as a well-intentioned offer to mail a package for a stranger leads him on an international trail to clear his name for murder, taking him to London and Berlin (circa the fall of the Berlin Wall) to trace the mysterious dangerous package while uncovering the various secrets of the parties involved, some of them buried in the long-ago past.

Offered DRM-free worldwide, available at multiple retailers.

Free for a limited time @ B&N & Amazon & Kobo (available DRM-free worldwide)

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.

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New translated books forthcoming from Roberto Bolaño (translated by Natasha Wimmer), Antonio Skarmeta (translated by John Cullen),Eduardo Halfon (translated by Lisa Dillman and Daniel Hahn), Mylene Fernández Pintado (translated by Dick Cluster), and a great new anthology--A Thousand Forests in One Acorn. An Anthology of Spanish-Language Fiction, edited by Valerie Miles.