French Pressed: A Coffeehouse Mystery, Book 6

I have read/listened to every other book in this series. Weirdly, I avoided this one. Why? Because it focused on Claire's daughter, Joy, who always came across to me as the most selfish, whiny, know-it-all brat without a lick of common sense. Shame on me for judging so harshly and waiting so long to read the best book in the coffeehouse series. Okay, yeah, Joy still didn't have a lick of sense. If she'd just go home at a respectable hour instead of gallivanting across Manhattan in the middle of the night, she wouldn't have found herself in so much trouble.

That said, her ordeal was nevertheless heartbreaking. Maybe it's because I'm a mom, but the thought of that young girl sitting in Rikers Island for days due to nothing but her own naivety was unbearable. I was cheering on Claire who busted through a bunch of cops in her quest to protect her child, and when she drove all over the city interrogating suspects, putting herself at risk just to find out the truth.

Lately, all of Cleo Coyle's coffeehouse mysteries start out with an annoying internal monologue of "the killer." It's gotten to where we have to suffer through these killer scenes throughout the whole book, which to me ruins the flow of the story. I don't want to know what the killer is thinking. I just want to guess who it is. French Pressed, I am happy to say, does not force those annoying scenes upon us. There's a quick killer scene in the beginning, but it's not the paranormal-psycho-theme-music type of scene we have to endure in some of the other coffeehouse books. Coyle even gave us a few good suspects to ponder over. The whole thing was well done with just enough of this and that.

Now for the grand praise. Rebecca Gibel outdid herself. Wow, her performance was worth an award. Throughout the book, Gibel had to switch from character to character, perfecting an impossible number of accents and dialects. She smoothly transitioned from Claire's nondescript talking voice to Esther Best's Brooklyn twang, jumped into a flawless rap song using a Russian accent, back to Brooklyn twang, then spoke fluent Russian, French, Old Lady, and Cop in a single chapter. What the heck? Who does that? Give this woman a medal! I was completely lost in her performance to the point that I forgot that it was the same person narrating the whole time. Very impressive.

I'm looking forward to the newest installment due to be released in the next few days. I hope the new one lives up to Book 6. It'll be a hard one to follow.

Just outline the crimes & characters, let reader make connections and try to figure out who did it.

No. I did not enjoy the main character doing the job of the police, she is not qualified and most certainly would not get the results necessary to solve a crime. I had a hard time believing everyone she spoke to would just tell her whatever she wanted to know.

I did enjoy the reader's ability to make each character sound different. I definitely knew who was speaking as characters changed and the dialog felt realistic, not forced or "mechanical".

I liked the storyline and finding out "who-done-it".

The main character, Claire, finds out her daughter is charged with murder. Rather than retaining an attorney, she decides she will find the real murderer herself. Claire, comes across as nosy and keeps identifying the killer (who, of course really isn't the killer). The whole "I will get everyone to tell me whatever I want to know" mentality is tiresome and annoying. I was thinking I didn't mind a few of the other books in the series, but this one -this not so much. If this would have been the first book in the series I read, I wouldn't have read anymore.