Sandra Balzo

"Maggy Thorsen's shock at finding her ex-husband Ted in a fight with William Swopes, an oral surgeon at Ted's dental practice, outside Uncommon Grounds, the Wisconsin gourmet coffeehouse she co-owns, is soon usurped by the horror of discovering a dead body outside Thorsen Dental's office block the next morning. Did he jump from the tenth-floor office window, or was he pushed?"--Amazon.com.

Maggy Thorsen, cynic extraordinaire, has a few things to feel optimistic about lately. After her original coffeehouse, Uncommon Grounds, was destroyed in a freak May blizzard, Maggy and her best friend, Sarah Kingston, have found the perfect spot to relocate - right next to the new commuter train in Milwaukee.After successfully securing the spot, Maggy and Sarah plan to piggyback the city's celebrations for the train and re-open Uncommon Grounds on...

When Maggy Thorsen and her beau, Sheriff Jake Pavlik, set out on a theatrical recreation of "Murder on the Orient Express" on a train ride through the Everglades, a real life mystery soon unfolds.

UNCOMMON GROUNDS A 21st-century spin on the traditional cozy- Maggy Thorsen, a divorcée whose husband left her for a 24-year-old, is eager to open a coffee shop, Uncommon Grounds, in the small Wisconsin town of Brookhills. In a world where Starbuck's and other chains are ubiquitous, Maggy is up for the challenge, which becomes even greater when Maggy discovers the body of one of her partners, Patricia Harper, on the floor of their coffee shop. Determined...

"The choice of an antique silver coffee urn as the final resting place for elderly Celeste Bouchard's ashes might seem a cruel joke. After all, the wealthy boutique owner was taken ill and died while daughter Hannah was off having lattes at Uncommon Grounds. But Maggy Thorsen, the coffeehouse's owner, has more pressing things on her mind: a jail break and subsequent shoot-out has forced her main squeeze, Sheriff Jake Pavlik, to take refuge with her....

Journalist AnnaLise Griggs return to her hometown in North Carolina's western mountains has led to some unexpected surprises, most notably the discovery that legendary womanizer Dickens Hart is her birth father, and she an heir to Hart's huge fortune. Founder of the White Tail Lodge, a High Country knock off of the Playboy concept , Hart now claims he wants to "do right" by any other children he may have fathered. To that end, he's invited all his...

In her delightful debut, Balzo puts a 21st-century spin on the traditional cozy, replacing tea with coffee as the comfort beverage of choice. Maggy Thorsen, a divorcée whose husband left her for his 24-year-old dental hygienist, and two women friends are eager to open a coffee shop, Uncommon Grounds, in the small Wisconsin town of Brookhills, whose inhabitants include such recognizable types as the local gossip and tennis moms. In a world where Starbuck's...

"There's a chill in the Wisconsin air and it's a shot in the arm--or 'triple shot' in this case--to Uncommon Grounds, the Brookhills coffeehouse owned by Maggy Thorsen and real estate maven Sarah Kingston. Not only is their relocation to the town's historic train station a success, the store's autumn drink, a 'Triple Shot, fully-leaded Espresso', is taking off, fueled by hefty doses of caffeine and sugar. All seems well, if a little jittery, in Brookhills...

Wisconsin coffeehouse owner Maggy Thorsen helps uncover the truth when a fire tears through her cousin's market and a gruesome discovery is made in the apartment upstairs.

Filling in for a vacationing Amy Caprese, Christy Wrigley is surprised when her long-distance, online boyfriend from Denver shows up at Wisconsin's Uncommon Grounds coffee shop.