At Cafe 64 by Shaeden Berry is a suspenseful crime, mystery thriller. It explores loss, grief, blame, anger, and relationships.
Without any warning, Justin Kowalski drives his vehicle across a line of traffic and through the front wall of Café 64, killing himself and three other people. The story is told by Maddie, Emily, and Flo, three strangers whose lives have been impacted by this tragedy.
The three women have been following online “The Victims of the Café 64 Tragedy Support Group”. Eighteen months after the tragedy, the group is holding a meeting for the victims. Maddie, Emily, and Flo attend.
Maddie, a fiancée left behind, is consumed by rage, relentlessly searching for answers as to why it has happened. Using the pretence of a podcast, she interviews victims, searching for anyone who could be blamed. Someone must have known Justin was planning to do this and could have prevented him.
Emily, a sister in hiding, is consumed by guilt and the secret she is keeping. Someone is stalking her. Who is it, what do they know, and is Emily in danger?
Then there is Flo, a bystander who insists she is fine and didn’t see anything at all, and is too scared to look back and remember that day. Flo has broken off her engagement.
Maddie, Emily, and Flo’s lives entwine. The three women are forced to confront their loss, grief, lies, and truths as they struggle to find a way to cope and move forward.
Shaeden Berry has chosen a great topic for this book. The main characters are strong. The writing style is great as she adds suspense by revealing a little bit about each character at a time, leading to a climactic conclusion.
It is a read you can’t put down as you gather all the pieces of the puzzle while feeling every emotion with Maddie, Emily, and Flo.
I found it quite a powerful and thought-provoking book, as it leads you to question exactly who is a victim, as it is not just the family of those who have died.
Thoroughly recommend this, it is a great read. Five stars.
A selection of our Beauty and Lace Club members are reading At Cafe 64 by Shaeden Berry. You can read their comments below or add your own review.
I love to read, any book on any topic. I now love ebooks as they are easier to store, I was running out of bookshelves! My other interests are family, gardening and our beautiful King Charles spaniel dog who is my reading companion.
At Café 64 by Australian author Shaeden Berry is a moving fictional story of life, death, tragedy, and connections.
Trigger Warnings: The novel contains sensitive themes, including driving occasioning death, emotional trauma, grief, and loss, which may be distressing for some readers.
At the heart of the story lies Café 64, a small, unassuming place that becomes a refuge for people seeking solace and understanding after a shocking tragedy where Justin Kowalski drives his vehicle across a line of traffic and crashes through the front wall, killing himself and three others. His actions are unknown and with lack of evidence and prosecutorial discretion it is labelled as an isolated incident.
Two years later, three women Maddie, Emily, and Flo meet through a victims’ support group. Each of them carries their own kind of pain. Maddie, the fiancée of the man behind the wheel, is angry, confused, and desperate to understand why. Emily is weighed down by guilt and secrets she cannot share. Flo, a survivor who insists she is fine, hides wounds that have not healed. Their stories intertwine beautifully, showing how grief connects and divides people at the same time.
The plot is less about what happens and more about how lives intersect, how people find solace in ordinary spaces, and how small moments of connection carry deep emotional weight. Themes of grief, loneliness, belonging, and the passage of time emerge naturally as each character’s story is revealed. Over time, the reader sees how the café becomes a place of emotional refuge, subtle connection, and personal growth.
The pacing is slow and thoughtful, which gives the reader time to sit with each character’s story and really feel their emotions. By the end, I was not just reading about them I was grieving with them and hoping for them to find the peace they were looking for.
At Café 64 is beautifully moving and deeply human story. It shows that everyone’s life is a different journey. Just like two people can read the same paragraph and come away with a different meaning, it is the same with life experiences. We each handle situations differently from each other. Life can cause one person to carry a torch of anger, while another may experience bouts of depression, and for others, they may exercise an element of forgiveness that allows healing to begin.
It made me cry, it made me think, and it reminded me how fragile and precious life really is especially what happens after a tragedy, when the spotlight fades and people are left to pick up the pieces. This novel will resonate with readers who appreciate character driven stories that linger in the heart and mind. I highly recommend.
Thank you, Beauty & Lace and Allen & Unwin, for the opportunity to read and review.
After being lucky enough to read and review Down the Rabbit Hole last year, I was so looking forwarding to reading ‘At Café 64’ by Shaeden Berry and it did not disappoint.
A story of a tragedy that brought shattered souls together to grieve, search for answers, find solace and heal. Maddie, Emily and Flo all deal with grief their way, there is no right or wrong way, they just ‘do you’ in their own particular style.
I really loved the way Shaeden dug deep into the characters personas, in Maddie, her bull at a gate approach, her stoicism, her do or die attitude at all costs, her unfaltering hunt to find justice for who was to blame. In people pleaser Emily, her guilt, her frailty, her protectiveness, and to Flo who is torn, and can’t escape her haunted memories of that day.
Along the way we are introduced to other characters reinforcing that grief has a far-reaching impact on so many others, whilst not directly involved, but, the ripple effect.
The story also explores the support mechanisms in place, and that it’s ok ‘to not be ok.’
This book is a must read, it will pull at your heart strings, you’ll shed a tear, and I’m so grateful to Echo publishing and Beauty and Lace for the opportunity to read and review ‘At Café 64.’
At Cafe 64 is the story of a fateful day that Justin Kowalski drove his car into cafe, killing three and the driver, injuring some and affecting many. This is the story of how survivors, loved ones and connected people react and then interact. This story is about Maddie who is angry as a loved one was killed, Emily who is connected to the driver and feels guilty and nervous and Flo who had just been at the cafe and is trying to stay positive in the aftermath. The three women all attend a support group for people involved with Cafe 64 and we get to see how even this affects them all.
This book feels like a journey that people would take after such an act and the feelings, emotions and actions are just as messy as real life. There were also the connections made between the three main characters even with such different experiences. This is a very thought provoking book and a great book for a book club with just as many questions coming out of it as were answered. It shows healing, if it happens, as something which can’t be rushed.
At Cafe 64 by author Shaeden Berry has just blown me away. I’ve never read a book that has grabbed hold of me and continue to resonate with me even after the final page has been read. This is a must read for fans of suspense, crime, thriller and mystery.
A tragedy has united strangers on so many levels, and we learn each of their stories and see how their lives have been impacted and continue to be impacted numerous months later. There was no warning on that fateful day that Justin Kowalski would drive his car across a line of traffic and through the wall of Cafe 64 not only killing himself but taking the lives of 3 innocent people who were just starting out their day. Maddie is left facing life on her own when her fiancée was killed. She finds herself all consumed by grief and rage searching for the truth at all costs. Justin’s sister Emily is weighed down by the guilt of Justin’s actions – just what are the secrets she hides? Flo – an innocent bystander maintains that she saw nothing, and her life wasn’t impacted that fateful day and that she is in fact fine. These three women meet at a support meeting 18 months later and their lives become entwined with the introduction of a podcast – initially begun out of anger and wanting to lash out/seek to hurt Justins family the way the other victims were hurt. I loved that by the end there was an awesome twist to the podcast, and the focus and changed to “the survivors were more than what happened to them” – it was a great way for them all to take back their power.
Thanks to Beauty and Lace book club, Echo publishing for my copy of At Cafe 64 and to author Shaeden Berry for another amazing book.