Looking for something to fill the time waiting for customers at the breweriana show? Tired of watching mediocre sit-com reruns during lulls in room-to-room trading? Or simply looking for an enjoyable book for a quiet evening? How about a suspenseful combination of history and intrigue set in and around a Milwaukee brewery? There is no discovery of a secret treasure map on the back of a brewery scene lithograph to parallel the movie National Treasure, but Full Circle by Nancy Gettelman offers a suspenseful mix of history, intrigue and beer.

Readers of this publication probably know Nancy Gettelman best as the author of A History of the A. Gettelman Brewing Co. However, that is only one of her six books, and the only one that features breweriana prominently, but a brewery is at the center of her latest novel, Full Circle.

As Sara Rebstock was stuck in Milwaukee traffic, she saw someone who looked strikingly like her husband Kyle, who had disappeared twenty years earlier and was presumed dead. She was not hallucinating, because her adult daughter Emma had the same experience that day. Was Kyle still alive, and if so, what was going on? If not, who is this person? Attempting to find the answer requires Sara to revisit the events surrounding Kyle’s disappearance.

Sara had worked at her family-owned brewery for years, and had gotten her somewhat less than satisfactory husband Kyle a job there. (The Streicher Brewery bears more than a passing resemblance to the Gettelman Brewing Co., which lends an air of authenticity to the descriptions.) When her parents died and she ascended to the brewery presidency, she turned the job over to Kyle hoping it would settle him down. Instead, he antagonized the other remaining family members, Uncle Vincent and Cousin Louis, and had a relationship with the female brewmaster that went much too far. Just prior to Kyle’s disappearance he had disputes with several people at the brewery, including one with Louis which involved the removal of several old files of papers on the brewery’s history. As a brewerianaist, I naturally wondered if these files contained lots of crisp pre-Prohibition letterhead—but that isn’t central to the plot.

To reveal any more of the story would ruin the suspense, but I can reveal more about the style of the novel. Gettelman writes easily and clearly, and has a gift for making characters believable. She engages the reader—not through over-dramatizing, but by making the reader actually care about what happens next on a more personal level. She shows her skill as a storyteller by weaving in discussion of Milwaukee landmarks, local history and brewing science smoothly and naturally. While not a Milwaukee native, she describes the city with the easy familiarity of a long-time resident and has an sense for what a visitor would want to know. She consulted several people in the brewing industry to make sure her accounts were correct and took a number of brewery tours to make sure scenes inside the brewery felt authentic.

Publishers need to put books in categories for marketing purposes, and a novel like this shows how difficult that task is for many works of fiction. In the author biography, Full Circle is called a suspense, and on the back cover it is listed as romance/mystery. There are no steamy love scenes, no all-knowing detectives and the missing person case does not develop into a series of ever-more gruesome murders. Is it possible to create a category for “good story?” Because that is what Full Circle is—a good story.