Brewed Awakening

I am unjustifiably surprised to find that their is yet another culinary based mystery series of which I have been totally unaware. There are almost 20 books in Cleo Coyle's "Coffeehouse Mysteries" series, this being the newest installment. Cleo Coyle is the pen name for the husband-and-wife team of Alice Alfonsi and Marc Cerasini. There is seemingly an endless appetite (all puns intended) for books featuring food, beverages and recipes. The protagonist of this series is coffee roaster par excellence and owner of the coffee shop Village Blend,  Clare Cosi. Clare awakes on a park bench in Washington Square with no memory of how she came to be there and why everything looks so different. Turns out that Clare disappeared several days earlier when she went to a private tasting for wedding cakes hosted by an acquaintance and friend of her former mother-in-law. That woman, hotel heiress Annette Brewster, was kidnapped at gunpoint based on video footage from the hotel's garage, and Clare was a witness. The only problem is--and it's a big one--Clare can't remember a thing, and, in fact, has lost all memory of the last 15 years of her life. In her mind, she has just found out that her ex-husband, Matteo, has been cheating on her for years, their daughter is still in pigtails, and she has never met the man she is engaged to marry, Detective Mike Quinn. A celebrity psychologist, Dr. Lorca, who specializes in working with memory problems, offers to take her on as a patient for no charge, but it quickly becomes apparent that he has alternative motives. Maybe they are as benign as having another subject for another best-seller, or maybe something more sinister is behind his desire to move Clare to his private clinic, locked away from everyone who knows and loves her. To complicate matters, the police become suspicious of Clare's memory lapse and begin to consider that Clare was complicit in the kidnapping. It is a pretty compelling mystery and a provocative premise. Kirkus notes it's "An unsettling, often scary account of how memory loss affects a strong woman’s life." Publishers Weekly calls it a " delightfully twisty mystery" and asks " an intriguing question: if you lost all memory of your beloved, would you fall for him all over again?"