by Cleo Coyle
First published 2004
Clare Cosi spent ten years in New Jersey raising her daughter Joy and keeping her distance from the Village Blend, the Greenwich Village coffeehouse she once managed. Now Joy is grown and gone, and Clare is restless. When Madame, the Blend's sharp and theatrical elderly owner, asks her to come back, Clare says yes. Her first morning on the job ends badly. She unlocks the front door and finds Anabelle, her young assistant manager, unconscious on the floor with coffee grounds scattered everywhere. The ambulance takes Anabelle away. Detective Mike Quinn shows up, finds no forced entry, and calls it an accident. Clare is not convinced. The trash bin is in the wrong spot. Something feels off. She starts asking questions Quinn never thought to ask, while also noticing that Quinn himself is harder to ignore than she expected. Clare is back in the city, back behind the counter, and already neck-deep in something that looks a lot less like an accident the longer she looks at it.
Genres: romance, mystery, crime, contemporary, adult-fiction
Vibes: charming, cozy, engaging, intriguing, suspenseful
Tropes: amateur-sleuth, forced-proximity, second-chance-romance, slow-burn
Setting: Greenwich Village, Village Blend, New Jersey, New York
Period: 21st-century, contemporary
368 pages · Hardcover · Wheeler Publishing
Content warnings: death