Murder by Mocha

June 27, 2011
La vita is definitely dolce these days for feisty Clare Cosi in Coyle's 10th coffeehouse mystery (after 2010's Roast Mortem): she has an exquisitely furnished, rent-free duplex above Village Blend, the Greenwich Village coffee shop she manages for her former mother-in-law; steamy amore with NYPD detective Mike Quinn; even a lucrative deal to use some of her Village Blend beans in Mocha Magic, a new love potion being pitched to women by a Web powerhouse, Aphrodite's Village. Of course, there's trenta-sized trouble brewing. Indeed, the Mocha Magic launch gala turns into a crime scene with Clare's discovery of a slain Aphrodite's Village exec. She soon finds a second murder victimâand herself in the line of fire. Until the pseudonymous Coyle (the wife-husband writing team of Alice Alfonsi and Marc Cerasini) starts stirring in too many subplots, this is a tasty espresso-dark tale of multigenerational crime and punishment lightened by the Blend's frothy cast of lovable eccentrics.

July 1, 2011

Mocha may be the inspiration for a series of murders.

Even though Clare Cosi is long divorced from Matt Allegro, she still works for Madame, his mother, running the Village Blend coffee shop and living over the store. But she doesn't usually have to work so hard to earn her overtime. While she's spending some quality time with her policeman lover Mike Quinn, Madame phones and orders her to rush over to the New York hotel where her old friend Alicia has awakened to find a blood-soaked corpse in bed with her. The cops Clare calls, however, arrive to find a room stripped of all clues, including any trace of a body. When she's not sleeping with the dead, Alicia is promoting her new Mocha Magic coffee, which she claims contains an herbal aphrodisiac. Clare is concerned because the Village Blend is providing the beans and she and her staff are offering up the brew along with some chocolate treats at several publicity parties. The new formula is being introduced by the enigmatic Aphrodite, whose entire female staff fiercely compete to rise in her organization. When the first party brings another murder along with the treats, Clare continues to probe despite her worries about her daughter, who's just returned from France, and Mike, who's involved in a nasty case of police corruption.

An overly busy plot keeps this from being the best of Coyle's coffeehouse mysteries (Holiday Grind, 2009, etc.). But foodies will doubtless enjoy the appended recipes.

(COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

August 1, 2011

Can a coffee concoction touted as a love potion be the reason the website editors for the Sisters of Aphrodite are being killed? This is taking "coffee to die for" too far, thinks Clare in her tenth outing (Roast Mortem).

Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.