Cafe Au Lait by M.L. Hamilton, Zion Sawyer has lived in the small town of Sequoia, CA for two months now and has settled in as the new owner of the Caffinator well. To bring income to their town, the locals stage a rock concert they call Redwood Stock and which is headlined by the popular Anaconda Glee Club. But the night of the Anaconda concert, Zion gets a call at 4 a.m. from her employee, 20- something hippy Deimos, that he has been arrested for murdering Marilee Whitmire, the young woman who went with him to the concert, probably by putting arsenic in the weed they smoked.
The situation of Deimos and the inexperience of the Sequoia sheriff in regards to murder cases persuades local hardware store owner Tate Mercer to come out of retirement from having been an LAPD detective. Getting talked by Zion into letting her help with his interviews, Tate finds himself entangled in the case far more deeply than he ever wanted. Then, Anaconda’s lead singer, a local young man who calls himself Jaguar, walks into the Caffinator, trailed by two bodyguards and asking for a job as a barista. Life in Sequoia never gets dull.
I thoroughly enjoyed getting to listen to Cafe Au Lait, as it has a dramatic story and compelling characters. I already felt connected to Zion and the others of Sequoia from listening to Cappuccino, but Cafe Au Lait enhanced my appreciation for them and investment in their lives. I really hoped that Tate would find a way to clear Deimos, and I found myself cheering for one man over the other in the love triangle.
On a technical note, in my review of Cappuccino, I noted the fact that the book kept referring to the trip from San Francisco to Sequoia as going “up” when Sequoia is south of San Francisco. In Cafe Au Lait, it refers to Fresno as “down” from Sequoia, when in reality, Fresno is north of Sequoia. I also had to laugh at the fact that when Tate plans to go to Los Angeles, he plans to drive to Fresno to catch a plane to LAX. However, doing so would not actually have saved him any time. Google Maps offers an estimated time of one hour and three minutes from Sequoia to the Fresno Air Terminal, and the flight to LAX takes about 45 minutes. With the amount of time needed to check in early to a flight and then get a rental car, Tate would take longer to fly than to drive the three hours and 23 minutes Google Maps indicates it takes to drive to Los Angeles from Sequoia. If an author is going to set a book in an actual location, then she needs to get such details accurate. These issues are very basic, simple points that just a glance at a map would have shown the accurate way for things to be described.
I really appreciate the performance of Kelley Hazen in the audio version of this book. Hazen has a highly pleasant voice that took me to the town of Sequoia as I enjoyed the book. With vivid voices that fit the various characters, she creates a whole community whom we feel we are visiting with her.
I highly appreciated listening to Cafe Au Lait, which came alive in its setting, making the people of the town seem real. I found it a real delight, and despite my concerns that the author didn’t do her proper homework on the location where her books are set, I don’t believe this harms the book in general, and only readers well familiar with the area would even notice these issues in the first place. So I give the book five stars.
Disclaimer: I received this book for free, but that had no influence upon the content of my review.
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