Samson's Deal: A Laid-Back Bay Area Mystery (The Jake Samson & Rosie Vicente Detective Series)

Unlicensed private eye Jake Samson is an ex-Chicago cop living a laid-back life in the San Francisco Bay Area with his friend and tenant, carpenter Rosie Vicente, to lend him a hand. He gets an offer of a $10,000 paycheck for finding out who killed the wife of a radical Berkeley professor who’s the prime suspect because he stands to inherit her considerable estate. He swears he didn’t do it. Someone else tossed her off the deck of their upscale hills home, he says. Or she jumped. He wants Jake to find out. Plenty of motives. Jealousy, money, dirty politics. The trail twists through the Bay Area’s wide-ranging cultural maze, from Berkeley politics to Oakland ashrams, while Jake and Rosie evade both the police and the killer to find the all-too-human answer.