Brewed Awakening

At the start of bestseller Coyle’s engrossing 18th Coffeehouse mystery (after 2018’s Shot in the Dark), Clare Cosi wakes up on a Washington Square park bench with no money, no identification, and no memory of how she got there. She knows she’s in Greenwich Village, though, and makes her way to her ex-mother-in-law’s Village Blend Coffeehouse, only to find it populated by people she doesn’t know. But they know her. To her horror, Clare realizes that it’s not only what happened yesterday that she doesn’t remember, it’s the entire past 15 years of her life—not that Village Blend now belongs to her, not that she’s engaged to NYPD Det. Mike Quinn, not that she has been missing for days, and not that she’s the last person to have seen hotel owner Annette Brewster, who’s presumed kidnapped. Amid the delightfully twisty mystery, Coyle (the husband-and-wife team of Alice Alfonsi and Marc Cerasini) poses an intriguing question: if you lost all memory of your beloved, would you fall for him all over again? [em]Agent: John Talbot, Talbot Fortune. (Dec.) [/em]