A review by thephdivabooks
Brewed Awakening by Cleo Coyle

4.0

This was a delightful twist on the cozy mystery! Very different than any story I’d read before and so much fun!

In Cleo Coyle’s Brewed Awakening, a coffee-shop owner and expert barista awakens on a park bench with no memory of the past fifteen years. And unfortunately, she also has been missing for several days and seems to be the sole witness to a missing person’s case—if only she could remember it! A fun, sweet, and unique cozy mystery that I highly recommend!

So, I haven’t read any of this series and I was shocked to learn that Brewed Awakening is book 18 in the Coffeehouse Mysteries! It easily read as a standalone and I felt completely caught up on the character back stories, while unspoiled on the previous 17 mysteries (which I definitely am reading after loving this so much)!

Opening with a glimpse into Clare’s proposal, the book flashes forward two months to Clare waking up on a park bench with no memory of how she got there. And pretty soon we realize that her memory gap may be even larger than we thought, as she runs into a pedestrian with a smart phone and seems to have no idea what it is. Returning to the coffee shop that she thankfully worked at fifteen years ago and still does today, Clare is greeted with open arms. Everyone was worried because she has been missing for several days!

And they are even more worried when they realize that she has no memory of the last fifteen years, including her engagement, current role running the coffeehouse, and her daughter growing up. But the more pressing issue arises when she gets locked away in a memory ward and her friends need to bust her out. On the run, Clare holds the key to the missing heiress, if only she can remember!

I loved the way this mystery delved into memory and sensory memory in particular. Clare’s very clever friends quickly are able to test that her memories are locked away somewhere, as she can remember specific coffee beans that her ex-husband brought back in the years after her memory went away. As she has built her life and passion around coffee, it seems to reawaken bits of her memory. It was fun and scary watching Clare try to remember. I worried she might not remember anything!

The conclusion to this was a lot of fun, and I loved that we got a healthy explanation of how the case was solved and what happened in the aftermath. Did Clare recover her memories? Was the heiress found? What about the person or people behind the kidnapping???

A fun read that I can’t recommend enough! Thank you Berkley for my copy. Opinions are my own.