No Roast for the Weary: 05/07/25

No Roast for the Weary by Cleo Coyle and Rebecca Gibel (Narrator) (2025) is the twenty-first book in the Coffeehouse mystery series. In the post-COVID lock down era, the Village Blend's foot traffic has dried up and I guess they're not hooked up to DoorDash or similar so they aren't getting take out orders either. They need to do something and the plan they all can agree on is a Writers' Block Workshop for the upstairs area.

The Writers' Block isn't a new idea, rather it's a rehashing of something the Village Blend had hosted decades earlier. Approximately forty years earlier a club of writers had set up at the Village Blend and had disbanded under tragic circumstances that Madame is reluctant to discuss.

As with any long running series, the "before times" tends to be a moving target, although as I discussed in my reviews of Brewed Awakening (2019) and my re-read of On What Grounds (2003), Cleo Coyle tends to be pretty good at keeping the timeline straight and doesn't take as many liberties with it as some authors do (the late Elizabeth Peters, for instance). Nor, however, are they as strict with it as Sue Grafton was.

What is salient here for the timeline is: the tragic events in the past happened before TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and presumably Xena: Warrior Princess. Buffy the film came out in 1992 and the series ran from 1997-2003 (ending the year On What Grounds was released. Xena, meanwhile ran from 1995 to 2001. If the hit TV series that's the crux of the cold case had its run before Buffy in it's film debut, then it would have come on air around the time as Murder She Wrote which began airing in 1984.

In the present day we have a mentally ill writer, Mr. Scrib, being attacked outside the Village Blend, and his sought after tell all manuscript going missing. We also have three murders that are all tied to the missing manuscript.

Although I think the amount of deaths is excessive, I do appreciate that there's no organized crime in this one. Nor does Claire spend pages and pages waxing poetical on the proper way of pulling espresso. The clues to the murderer's identity are laid out for easy picking by an observant reader. The cold case story is also captivating enough to keep things interesting, and thankfully doesn't rely on Claire reading aloud pages and pages of Mr. Scrib's journal (or anyone else's for that matter).

Five stars

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