My husband and I have been living and working in New York City for over twenty years. Our Coffeehouse Mysteries—a unique blend of crime, romance, humor, and action—are set here, too, around a landmark Greenwich Village coffee shop called the Village Blend.

Through eight books, our quirky town has fueled us with strange-but-true ideas for characters and plotlines from criminal to culinary. For the ninth entry in our series, we drew inspiration from yet another local source: New York’s Bravest.

It’s hard not to admire New York firefighters (and I’m not even going to flash you with the annual hunks in hardhats calendar). Oh, sure, they can be as cranky and crazy as the rest of us. After all, most of them actually like running into burning buildings. But I think of them more as knights in bunker gear.

Even their symbol is a knightly one—the Maltese Cross. “Every firefighter works in courage,” states the FDNY, “a ladder rung away from death, willing to lay down his life for you.”

Now that’s the stuff of heroes and (crazy or not) heroes inspire writers. In fact, the very idea of running into a burning building to save an innocent victim struck me as the perfect analogy for what Clare Cosi does in our Coffeehouse Mysteries.

A divorced single-mom in her forties, Clare is a coffee shop manager by day, an irrepressible sleuth by night. When something is wrong, she considers it her mission to right it—and arson that leads to murder is as wrong as it gets.

At the start of Roast Mortem, an unknown arsonist begins torching cafés around the city. When an FDNY ladder company comes to the rescue of Clare and her co-workers, she returns the favor by rescuing these fearless few from some seriously bad coffee. Then her new firemen friends begin dying in suspicious ways, and Clare finds reason to believe their deaths are connected to the coffee shop arsonist. Unfortunately, a member of the FDNY stands in her way. This strapping captain clearly has something to hide. But as Clare starts to dig deeper, someone threatens to extinguish her.

If you’ve never picked up a Coffeehouse Mystery, don’t let that stop you from reading Roast Mortem. You can certainly enjoy it as a stand-alone novel. If you’ve been a fan of the series, this is one you won’t want to miss. The events of the story trigger highly personal consequences for Clare, which keep her reeling until the very end.

Read with joy,
~ Cleo

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