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One of the best reviewed first novels of the season!

Uncommon Grounds by Sandra Balzo
(Five Star)

Reviewed by Dick Adler in the Chicago Tribune:

Despite my attraction to the darker, colder kind of mysteries and thrillers, I try to keep some-where near the middle of my mind the words of Anthony Boucher--who invented taking crime fiction seriously--when he wrote that "the important distinction is not between the schools of the whodunit but between the good and bad books whatever the school." That's why I'm especially pleased to praise Sandra Balzo's first novel, "Uncommon Grounds," which might well be of the cozy persuasion but is as wonderfully rich and sharply written as anything going.

Balzo, whose first short story won the prestigious Robert L. Fish Award, has imagined for her full-length debut the perfect modern equivalent of a British tea shoppe--a new coffeehouse in Brookhills, a small Wisconsin town as full of colorful, murderous lunatics as any Agatha Christie or Dorothy Sayers landscape. And she has created an interesting lead character: Maggie Thorsen, a public-relations expert whose husband has deserted her for a much younger dental hygienist. Thorsen and two friends decide to start Uncommon Grounds, a coffeehouse definitely more user-friendly than Starbucks, and all goes smoothly until opening day--when one of the partners is found dead on the floor.

Cozies have their own set of rules, so Thorsen's investigation of her partner's murder quickly takes on some comfortable rituals: Everyone in town has a dark secret, there is physical danger lurking for Maggie, and there's even a touch of possible romance with a new county sheriff. What moves Balzo's book high above other writers who try to cover the same territory is a sharp and often amusing skill that convinces us that this is real life, and that it matters.

Add Uncommon Grounds to your shopping cart. This book is available now in paperback for $13.95