Review: Roast Mortem

Roast Mortem by Cleo Coyle
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have grown to love this series to where it has become one of my top five series of must read when the books come out. Cleo Coyle knows how to make the characters intriguing, fun, witty, and most importantly, likeable. This is the ninth book in the coffeehouse mystery series, and each one gets better and better.

Clare Cosi operates a little coffee house, Village Blend, along with her ex-husband Matt and his mother Madam. When Madam asks Clare to drive her to an old friend, Enzo’s restaurant where he has a very old expresso maker that Clare is dying to see. Madame and Enzo are in the basement and Clare goes upstairs, she can’t help but snoop around, I think it’s in her DNA to snoop, when suddenly there’s an explosion setting the restaurant in blazes and Madam and Enzo trapped in the basement. The NY fire dept. shows up and rescues Madam and Enzo from the basement. The fire Marshall thinks at first that Enzo started this fire for the insurance money so that he can return to Italy to live out the rest of his life, but Clare hears somethings that didn’t make sense to her and her curiosity ends up getting the better of her and she precedes to do her own investigation to help the fire Marshall capture the right person.

When Clare goes over to the fire house to help the firemen learn how to use their new coffeemaker, Clare meets her detective boyfriend Mike Quinn’s cousin, Michael Quinn, and she soon learns that there is a lot of bad blood between the cousins. But when another fire breaks out in another coffee shop, Clare has a feeling this just isn’t an accident, not when another fire fighter loses his life to the fire. Clare starts piecing things together and remembers what she has learned about the equipment and how they work from what the other firefighters tell her, that when she learns of the death of the fallen fire fighter, she turns to Michael Quinn to find out more, but when Michael’s had to much to drink at a pub he makes a pass at Clare, while she’s fighting him off the next thing she knows Michael is on the ground and her boyfriend Mike is on top of him. Mike looks at the two of them and walks away. Clare goes after him to talk to him and he leaves her behind. Clare now has to try and help solve the mystery behind the fires to help save Enzo and she has to make Mike see that she truly loves him and what he saw wasn’t what he thought it was, but is there enough time to do both.


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