Clare arrives at work to discover the assistant manager dead in the back of the store, coffee grounds strewn everywhere. Two detectives investigate. But when they find no sign of forced entry or foul play, they deem it an accident. Still, Clare is not convinced. And after the police leave, Clare can't help wondering...If this was an act of murder, is she in danger?
My Thoughts :
This book/series has been on my wishlist for a while and when I saw it cheap on Audible I snatched it up. I, like most people, love coffee and drink a couple of cups a day to survive work and life in general. Coffee shops are a regular occurrence and despite not having a regular coffee place I do live in Vienna which is famous for its coffeehouses.
I'll start by saying that if I had read the book I may have actually given up on it. Listening to the book was hard enough and at some points I thought about turning it off and starting something else. Why? The coffee! Yes this is a cozy with a coffee theme but wow! I think half of the book was coffee facts, how to make coffee, Clare making coffee (always a long descriptive process) and stories about coffee. It was too coffee and it was annoying.
Clare is a total coffee snob and she is constantly going off on tangents talking about coffee this and coffee that. At first I thought it would be nice to hear a few facts but this author went over the top. It drowned out the actual story and made me want to slap Clare. She may run a coffeehouse and love coffee but she needs to get a life.
That wasn't all that annoyed me. There was so many unbelievable things. The fact that Clare's mother-in-law just gave her the coffeehouse to run with loads of incentives and the free apartment on top was just too easy. Clare being a mother also felt weird. She used it as an excuse/reason for things but I never really believed she was a loving mother. More distant than close. I won't even get started on her relationship with her ex. I could rant all day.
The plot would have been good if there had been more of it. There was so much potential at the beginning but it seemed very flat and boring till the end. So much coffee chat and not enough action made things drag on and on. I felt like the story was taking place over a week or two weeks but in reality only two days had passed.
There must be something amazingly good about this series because there are another twelve installments after this one. So I have to believe that the author gets a grip on the characters and grows into the series because otherwise I can't understand how there can be so many more books about the coffeehouse. For this reason and this reason only I am going to at least try book two in the series. I am intrigued to see what the author comes up with next and if the many kinks get ironed out.
Lovers of coffee will appreciate the in-depth workings of everything coffee but if you are looking for a strong cozy then you may want to rethink this one.
3 comments:
:) I had the same reaction. It was worse for me because I'm one of the few people in the world that does not like coffee. I can't even stand the smell, so this was a hard book for me. I also got it on audible, so it was the listening version.
Oh and to annoy me...
I went to audible to add book #2 to my wishlist and found that Audible don't even have the whole series available!! So you can listen to the first 4 or 5 books then two are missing then there are a few more then a couple of more are missing! Bleh!
I bought this book too from audible and had the same thoughts. The descriptions of coffee were a bit over the top.
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