Synopses & Reviews
Corinna Chapman was once a high profile accountant and banker. That is until she walked out on the money market and her dismissive and unpleasant husband James, threw aside her briefcase, and doffed her kitten heels forever. Now she is a baker working in her own business, Earthly Delights, in Flinders Lane, Melbourne, Australia.
Corinna is living in an eccentric building on the Roman model called Insula, which has eight stories, sixteen apartments, and a lot of strange and interesting people. These include a retired professor of classics, Dionysius Monk; a Dutch gardener named Trudi; Mr. and Mrs. Pemberthy and their rotten little doggie, Traddles; a pair of disgustingly thin, would-be soapie stars Goss and Kylie; and a jobbing witch, Meroe of The Sibyls Cave.
Corinna is quite content with her cat Horatio and her shop until a junkie falls half dead on her grate, a gorgeous sabra stalks along her alley and tells her that she is beautiful, and she starts receiving threatening letters accusing her of being a scarlet woman.
Then it is Goths, lost girls, fraud, late nights, nerds, and beautiful slaves. Life for Corinna has suddenly become interesting. And she still needs to get her bread out in time for the morning rush....
Includes recipes. Earthly Delights is the first book in this delicious new series by the award-winning author who brought us the Phryne Fisher series.
Review
""A buxom baker and a handsome man of mystery solve a series of crimes.
Corinna Chapman has left her driven husband and high-pressure job to open Earthly Delights, a bakery in Melbourne. A unique Roman-style apartment house provides lodgings for her, her cat Horatio and a diverse bunch of neighbors that includes Meroe the Witch, retired professor Dionysius Monk, the Pemberthys and their spoiled dog, a Dutch lady gardener, some computer nerds and sylph-like aspiring actresses Goss and Kylie, who help in the bakery. A series of threatening letters addressed to Corinna and the other ladies in the building soon escalate to spray-painted death threats, the first on the wall of a nearby shop owned by androgynous dominatrix Mistress Dread. Corinna's life changes dramatically when she meets Daniel Cohen, an attractive man who works nights on the Soup Run delivering food to the city's homeless, and hires the homeless junkie Jason, who has an amazingly light hand with muffins, to help clean the bakery. She wonders if her ex, who's hatched a scheme to buy her apartment house and tear it down, could be the poison pen. At length, she and Daniel get to the bottom of the threats, discover who's killing off junkies with hot-shots and have a sexy adventure at the local Goth club with a vampire named Lestat.
Poles apart from Greenwood's popular heroine Phryne Fisher (The Green Mill Murder, 2007, etc.), but equally delightful.""--Kirkus
About the Author
Kerry Greenwood is the author of more than 40 novels and six non-fiction books. Among her many honors, Ms. Greenwood has received the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award from the Crime Writers' Association of Australia. When she is not writing she is an advocate in Magistrates' Courts for the Legal Aid Commission. She is not married, has no children and lives with a registered Wizard.