It’s Tuesday again, and as I said yesterday a the weather is turning autumnal, so my reading is turning towards mysteries. And at the weekend I started in on a couple of the cozy crime paperbacks that I had on the shelf – and one of them is my pick today.
The heroine of To Brew or Not to Brew is Max (short for Maxine) who is in the process of setting up her own craft brew pub in Pittsburgh. She’s trained as a brewmaster in Germany and has bought a building that used to be part of a (larger and now closed) brewery to open her business in. But it seems like someone doesn’t want her to open – what starts as acts of sabotage turn fatal as her assistant is found dead in the brewery. The police (in the form of her homicide detective dad) think that it’s accidental, but Max isn’t convinced and sets out to investigate herself. Along the way she reconnects with a school crush and adopts a kitten, but will her business (and Max herself!) survive until the grand opening?
There are so many cozy crime novels that are small food-and-or-drink businesses, but this felt like a nice change. There’s a bit of suspension of disbelief required when it comes to Max’s dad being in anyway involved in the police case, but that’s a fairly common thing in cozy crime to be honest – see also businesses managing to remain open and solvent despite bodies turning up all over the place. I also thought that the setting felt very distinctive – I haven’t been to Pittsburgh but it felt like it was grounded in the reality of an actual real place rather than something that would have been the same if it had been set in any other city.
I did have the murderer figured out fairly early, but given that this was doing loads of set up for a series I can forgive it that. This came out in 2015 and there are two more, which I would definitely read if I can lay my hands on them but they’re not available on Kindle in the UK and I think I got lucky finding this one in Waterstones Piccadilly (lets not contemplate how long ago it was that this popped up in Books Incoming or I’ll get really depressed at my rate of progress on the pile). But I guess there’s always a chance that next time I go in there they’ll have the others I guess? Joyce Tremel has a couple of other series too which I’ll keep an eye for but I suspect they’re going to be as hard to find as the sequels to this are.
Happy Reading!
This sounds like the perfect book for my daughter in law who loves craft beer and breweries. I will definitely try to get hold of a copy.