Devil's Food

By Kerry Greenwood

If there’s one thing that Corinna Chapman, baker extraordinaire and proprietor of the Earthly Delights Bakery, can’t abide, it’s people not eating well – particularly when there are delights like her very own, just-baked, freshly buttered sourdough bread to enjoy. So when a strange cult which denies the flesh and eats only famine bread turns up, along with a body which is found in a park, dead of malnutrition, Corinna is very disturbed indeed.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781615953745

Kerry Greenwood

Kerry Greenwood was born in the Melbourne suburb of Footscray and after wandering far and wide, she returned to live there. She has degrees in English and Law from Melbourne University and was admitted to the legal profession on the 1st April 1982, a day which she finds both soothing and significant. Kerry has written three series, a number of plays, including The Troubadours with Stephen D’Arcy, is an award-winning children’s writer and has edited and contributed to several anthologies. The Phryne Fisher series (pronounced Fry-knee, to rhyme with briny) began in 1989 with Cocaine Blues which was a great success. Kerry has written twenty books in this series with no sign yet of Miss Fisher hanging up her pearl-handled pistol. Kerry says that as long as people want to read them, she can keep writing them. In 2003 Kerry won the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Australian Association.

Reviews for Devil's Food

[drled_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Synopsis: Both of Corinna's workers are almost poisoned, her hippie mother is looking for her husband, and weird monks appear at her door demanding famine bread. Everything continues to revolve around feeding people, although some are almost killed.Review: This book starts out very well, but the ending seems to fall flat. Everyone who seems to be a 'bad guy' turns out to be simply misguided.

[khiemstra631 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kerry Greenwood surely qualifies as a one-woman industry due to her prolific output. She has two new books out at present, this one and the latest in her Phryne Fisher series. The Corrina Chapman books are a bit darker than the Phryne books, but they give an insight into Australian city life that Americans might otherwise never experience. The mysteries involved are rather minor, and the baking is heavy-duty with recipes included. Beware, however, that this book includes numerous anti-George Bush comments which make it seem rather dated already. They did not add anything to the book, and perhaps the author would be well-advised to keep her views on American politicians separate from her mystery series.

[theelliemo · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I like the interesting collection of varied oddball characters that live in the apartment block that houses Corinna Chapman’s bakery. The stories aren’t grabbing me as much as Greenwood’s Phryne Fisher series, however, though I’m not sure why.

[heatherlinc · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I found this book disappointing after the first two in the "Corinna Chapman Mystery" series. The 'crime' sub-plot was weak, to say the least, and the humour was lacking. Don't think I'll bother with any more in this series.

[jetangen4571 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Australia, verbal-humor, small-business, cats, exmilitary, situational-humor, family-dynamics, friendship Corinna's love life, business, and friendships are going well. On the other hand her looney parents, a new religious cult, and a dangerous herbal concoction are driving her to the edge of her wits! This book is truly a wild ride! Loved it! Narrator Louise Siverson is absolutely fantastic!

[veracite · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I dislike Corinna. To use a metaphor that Corinna might use, it's like I'm having my fur stroked the wrong way; it makes me want to draw a blood-beaded line down the stroking hand with my kitty claws.

I do like the other characters. I feel almost media fannish in my desire to rescue them. Kylie and Goss are more than cardboard cut-out aspiring actresses. Jon has a more mature and thorough understanding of aid and development than Corinna. He doesn't, for example, think of program partners as the poor and wretched. Kepler is not gay Lin Chung, beautiful and characterless.

Etc.

Also, I like books set in my town.

[bsquaredinoz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

After my last read, an excellent book but tackling the darkest of subjects, I was looking for something a little lighter. Devil’s Food, the third in the Corinna Chapman series, fit the bill nicely. In this outing Corinna is forced to search for her lost, but not much loved, hippie father while sorting out if someone is poisoning the young slimmers of inner Melbourne.

It’s not exactly hard-boiled crime fiction but it does, in its way, tackle some of the seedier points of living in a big, modern city, although aided by liberal doses of wit and fun and the occasional biting social comment. Greenwood’s large cast of characters are deliciously exotic and quirky although she provides enough detail to make them realistic too. They form a big, odd, wonderful family based in and around an intriguing apartment building. I thoroughly enjoyed snuggling under a blanket on a cold, wintry afternoon with this book, which even phsycially is gergeous in all it's shiny pinkness, while pondering whether I could move into one of the spare appartments to join in the fun.

[phyllis2779 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

An enjoyable mystery, mostly because the Australian setting was just different enough to be unique. I also like that the principal sleuth was a baker. However, there were so many characters that I had some difficulty keeping them all straight and the mysteries weren't all that mysterious.

[little_prof · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“Devil’s Food” is the third Corinna Chapman mystery by Kerry Greenwood. It is the first on audio that I can find however and so I started with it. Corinna is a baker in Melbourne and actually enjoys getting up at 4 a.m. to bake bread for local restaurants and the customers that come into her shop “Earthly Delights”. She also enjoys consuming the fruits of her labors and is not shy about it. Corinna is down to earth and I’d love to have her shop somewhere near me, especially if it comes with her muffin magician of an apprentice, Jason. The description of his herb muffins or his apricot orgasam muffins or especially his rosewater Kama Sutra muffins have kept me perpetually hungry during this book. Corinna’s father is missing, there is a mysterious weight loss tea that has made her two assistants incredibly ill, and there is a strange group of monks going under the name of the “Bodiless Brotherhood” that are ordering famine bread from the bakery. Corinna finds them more than a little creepy, but with her father missing she’s directing her energies toward the search until a body turns up in the local park showing all the signs of starvation.

[kblinn_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kerry Greenwood surely qualifies as a one-woman industry due to her prolific output. She has two new books out at present, this one and the latest in her Phryne Fisher series. The Corrina Chapman books are a bit darker than the Phryne books, but they give an insight into Australian city life that Americans might otherwise never experience. The mysteries involved are rather minor, and the baking is heavy-duty with recipes included. Beware, however, that this book includes numerous anti-George Bush comments which make it seem rather dated already. They did not add anything to the book, and perhaps the author would be well-advised to keep her views on American politicians separate from her mystery series.

[melwil_2006 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I was lookinmg forward to Devil's Food - the first book had been bad, but addictive. The second book had been better than the first. I was hoping this was a sign of better things to come.No suck luck.Devil's Food has so many flying plot lines that it's really quite impossible to work out where to begin. Monks, missing fathers, corrupt police, fake herbs, smuggling, nerds, goths . . .Not to mention the shameful fact that Greenwood bought Corinna's mother into the fiction, than barely used her at all.Greenwood has become terribly lazy with this book. Phrases are used over from other books - her cats are still eating "Endangered Species of the Southern Ocean". Corinna's "need to feed hungry things" has still "met its fulfillment in Jason." And Jason is moved temporarily into the building, putting all of Corinna's people in one place. Oh, and the strange lapse into third person somewhere near the end. And the pages long argument over which character in the OC was cuter.As part of this book deals with weight, I feel that I need to make mention of something. Corrina (according to the website) weighs 100kg and feels the need to make some disparaging remarks about thin women. This is a surefire way to piss me off, and actually made the characters rather distateful, in a way I had not felt before. I'm not sure if it's a character flaw, or an author flaw, but I wasn't impressed.The worst book of the three.