Roast Mortem by Cleo Coyle.*
Claire Cosi is back in the ninth Coffeehouse Mystery. Having promised to take her ex-mother-in-law (affectionately known as "Madame") to visit an old friend. Enzo Testa, himself the proprietor of a cafe, has offered the Village Blend an antique coffee roaster. While in the basement checking out the roaster, Claire gets a call from one of her baristas and runs upstairs to let him in. As she closes the door behind Dante, she inadvertently sets off a bomb.
Luckily, there's a fire station just down the street, so firefighters arrive within minutes. But Dante is hurt, and Madame and Enzo are trapped downstairs. The building is lost, but Claire and her friends survive. The next day they find out that another coffeehouse was burned down at almost the same time.
Is someone targeting the coffeehouses in New York? And is the Village Blend on the arsonist's list? Claire is determined to solve the puzzle before anything happens to her beloved shop.
Many of the Village Blend "gang" appear, including Claire's ex-husband Matt and her current
flame Detective Mike Quinn.
Many series lose steam after so many installments, but all the volumes of this one have been consistently good. The plots remain interesting and the characters develop in believable ways.
With luck we haven't seen the last of Claire Cosi.
*Full disclosure: I received a review copy of the book from the publisher.
I didn't realize there were so many (as 9!) in this series. I took a break after the first three, when they started to seem a bit too much alike...
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