Earthly Delights

By Kerry Greenwood

"Put on the coffee pot, whip up a batch of muffins (yes, two recipes are included), and enjoy this thoroughly original tale. Strongly recommended for fans of offbeat mysteries." —Library Journal STARRED review

One day, Corinna Chapman, high profile accountant and banker, 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 with her own business, Earthly Delights, in Melbourne, Australia, living in an eccentric building on the Roman model called Insula with a lot of similarly eccentric people.

She and her cat Horatio are quite content with this new life until a junkie falls half dead on her grate, a gorgeous sabra stalks along her alley telling her that she is beautiful, and threatening letters accusing her of being a scarlet woman begin to arrive. Then suddenly Goths, lost girls, fraud, late nights, nerds, and beautiful slaves complicate life for Corinna. And she still needs to get her bread out for the morning rush....

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sourcebooks
• Release date: Mar 31, 2012
• ISBN: 9781615953721

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 Earthly Delights

[sasham-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

It took me a little while to get into this one but once I was about 1/3 of the way in I was hooked. I've read a few of Greenwood's Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries and this modern series is definitely worth reading

[jenneb_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Fun and a little strange.

[little_prof · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Corinna is the baker and propritress of Earthly Delights in Melbourne. She (mostly) enjoyes getting up at 4 a.m. to bake bread for local restraunts and her own shop. Being up so early gives her a slightly different perspective on the local scene. Her part of Melborne has always had it's share of junkies and derelicts, but when one of her mouse catching cats comes into the bakery with a syringe stuck in his paw and Corinna finds an unconscious girl on her grate she knows that this is something out of the ordinary. Before long she finds herself employing a detoxing junkie as kitchen swab, volunteering bread and her time on the Soup Run to feed the city's homeless, and teaming up with a mysterious, but oh so sexy hunk named Daniel to discover who is poisioning Melbourne's junkies. At the same time, the women in her apartment house are under attack from poison pen letters. They are all receiving slightly blurry missives calling them harlots and scarlet women and threatening their lives. It's more than one baker can stand so Corinna decides to put a stop to it. Once and for all.

[tracyk1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Absolutely Enjoyable! Enjoyed it. Have read the author's Phryne Fisher series and now enjoy both. Very different but a fun cozy.

[melwil_2006 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Ok. So I have recently overdosed on Kerry Greenwood books. And I have problems with them.The first one concerns the baking. Corrina, the main character and narrator, is a baker. Ms Greenwood, our author, presumably knows nothing about bakeries apart from the notion that they smell good. She begin baking sometime about 4.30 (seeing that she wakes at 4, has coffee and breakfast and then dresses before baking) and gets all the work done (both for orders and for the shop) in about three and a half hours. And she has a mouse problem which is solved with cats. Which in the first book the health inspector has no problem with.The second concern is the Ancient History. Greenwood has digusted me before by using the phrase "those hoi polloi" (Translated into english - those the people). Now she has a building built in some 'Roman' style, with apartments given Roman names. Included amongst the inhabitants is a classics Professor who is presumably so into the Romans that he had Roman furniture made. But his life work? Translating Aristophanes. 1. Aristophanes is not that hard - novice greek learners (like me) can translate large amount. 2. Aristophanes was Greek. Writing in Greek. When I learnt Greek, us pro-hellenic types rather looked down on the Romans who stole everything from the Greeks . . . (ok, leave the Greek vs. Roman debate for later). Anyway - it doesn't add up.Third problem - a problem I'm beginning to notice with Australian crime novels. A cute little habit of making an in-joke about the location.Fourth problem - these books are going to be terribly dated. Phillip Ruddock jokes and Buffy references.Fifth problem - 18 year olds who read Girlfriend. They might be ditzes, but they would have given Girlfriend up about 14 or 15 and moved on to Comso/CleoAnyway, in the first book Corrina finds a body outside her bakery, meets a tall dark stranger, goes to a goth club, finds a bakery assistant who makes good muffins, and searches for a missing girl. Badly written, badly researched a lot of the time, but strangely addictive. I was looking forward to the second book.

[pjhugs · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

It's very very rare that I stay up until the wee hours of the morning to finish a book. I read this in one day and stayed up until 4:30am to finish it. I loved it! Barely any violence and although technically a "murder mystery", the murders were never witnessed and never described in detail unlike titles in that particular genre. I can hardly wait to read the next one in the series!!

[drled_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Synopsis: Corinna is a baker in a area of Melbourne that is busy during the day but not quite so nice in the evening. Finding a dying junkie on her grate early one morning begins her adventures in murder. What also follows is a stalker who is threatening the women in the apartment building in which she lives. She also meets a very handsome private investigator, a young man who will become her baking assistant. Review: This is almost a cozy mystery in that Corinna is rather cozy. Her friends from the area are a witch, a retired professor, a set of nerds, a cross-dressing dominatrix, two young wanta-be actresses, a gardener, and a man who is searching for his daughter. I'm hoping these characters remain in these stories.

[grayday101 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kerry Greenwood's Corinna Chapman series about an accountant turned baker came as a welcome exception to the recent general dumbing down of the 3C (coffee, crafting, cooking) mysteries. Corinna owns and operates Earthly Delights, a small bakery in center city Melbourne, Australia. It is located on the first floor of the Insula, a quirky apartment building designed like an ancient Roman villa. Corinna used the buyout from her accounting job to purchase both the bakery and her apartment, named (not numbered) Hebe, directly above it with her house cat Horatio. A pair of stray cats perform rodent patrol in the bakery at night.Corinna operates her bakery with only some part time counter help, so her days are long. In Earthly Delights she opens her bakery door early one morning to let her rodent police, Heckle and Jekyll, out and finds a young girl dying in the street, apparently of a drug overdose. While Corinna's quick response saves the girl, a series of similar drug-related deaths begin to occur around the city. Meanwhile, Corinna and her neighbors in the Insula are being harassed by an anonymous religious fanatic who leaves threatening letters and defaces and damages the shops. While this series has a wonderful cozy feel to it, there is some rough language - it is the inner city, after all - and some sweet not too explicit sex. Corinna and her community remind me of Armistead Maupin's characters in Tales of the City; bittersweet and charmingly funny. I was so enchanted by the setting, characters, and sly Australian humor in Earthly Delights that I have ordered the rest of the series.

[bsquaredinoz · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I recently imposed on myself a challenge to discover new (to me) Australian authors but having never warmed to Kerry Greenwood’s more famous mystery series I approached Earthly Delights with a mixture of trepidation and anticipation.

Fortunately I found no need for the trepidation. The characters, plot and writing are all equally solid and I was hooked by page five. This is the first of Greenwood’s Corinna Chapman series and accordingly takes some time to introduce the protagonist and her intriguing supporting cast. The inclusion of oddities such as a white which, a dominatrix, a vampire sub-culture and a Roman apartment building in modern-day Melbourne could have been a disaster but Greenwood has made them all, including the building and the city itself, fully-rounded characters rather than the caricatures a lesser author might have created.

Chapman’s involvement in the crimes that form the basis of the plot seems far more natural and credible than is the case with many amateur sleuth stories. This natural feel is enhanced by the quick, dry humour of the main character and just enough slightly left-of-centre social commentary to keep things really interesting. All in all this was an unexpected delight and I can’t wait to read the next one in the series.

[ellenavondale · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I still don't know what I think of this story.

I read it all, relatively quickly.
With each press on the Kindle, I wondered why I was still reading it, but read it I did.

I think it was a romance. Well, "I love yous" were exchanged.

I think there was a mystery, people died and people almost died and people were arrested.

There were some vampires. They were fake, but they thought they were real.

There was some baking done. And recipes dutifully appended to the end.

These are all elements I usually enjoy, but...

I liked the characters. There was nothing to dislike about them. You saw the positive, not the negative. You saw what you were told, not what you could intuit. I guess this is a way of saying I saw no depth. I have no idea why the H would fall in love with the h, except of course for what he said, she looked hale and healthy and like she would age nicely as rounded as she was. Even the h is not sure why she fell in love with the H. I mean, as she said, she didn't know him.

The murders were solved, but they weren't so much murder as providing the weapon, heroin. Then there was an almost murder, but the murderer was found before the death occurred.

And then it ended and we were presented with recipes. Okay. Done. I guess everybody was just done.

So yeah, I liked it, I guess. I have never had to use the Kindle dictionary as much as I did in this one. I looked up words and gods and concepts and poets and constellation and Goth-isms.

Ms. Greenwood writes an intriguing story, but I wouldn't call it engrossing. Thought was provoked, but soon forgotten.

Yeah, I still don't know how I feel about this. I am not hitting "one click" on my Kindle so I guess that says a lot. I guess. Who knows. I never have written "I guess" so many times.

I guess, though, I am glad I read it. But I doubt I will read more.

[kathy89_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This was okay book about a woman baker with her own bakery in a rundown neighborhood. The story starts when a girl in back of the Corinna’s shop almost dies from a drug overdose when Corina finds her and gives her CPR until the rescue workers arrive. This introduces the characters of Daniel, a driver of the soup truck that delivers food to the homeless during the night and a “teenage” boy who had a drug habit but is trying to go clean and wants to learn baking into the story. I was a little disappointed in the way the ending turned out .

[ellen1213_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I still don't know what I think of this story.

I read it all, relatively quickly.
With each press on the Kindle, I wondered why I was still reading it, but read it I did.

I think it was a romance. Well, "I love yous" were exchanged.

I think there was a mystery, people died and people almost died and people were arrested.

There were some vampires. They were fake, but they thought they were real.

There was some baking done. And recipes dutifully appended to the end.

These are all elements I usually enjoy, but...

I liked the characters. There was nothing to dislike about them. You saw the positive, not the negative. You saw what you were told, not what you could intuit. I guess this is a way of saying I saw no depth. I have no idea why the H would fall in love with the h, except of course for what he said, she looked hale and healthy and like she would age nicely as rounded as she was. Even the h is not sure why she fell in love with the H. I mean, as she said, she didn't know him.

The murders were solved, but they weren't so much murder as providing the weapon, heroin. Then there was an almost murder, but the murderer was found before the death occurred.

And then it ended and we were presented with recipes. Okay. Done. I guess everybody was just done.

So yeah, I liked it, I guess. I have never had to use the Kindle dictionary as much as I did in this one. I looked up words and gods and concepts and poets and constellation and Goth-isms.

Ms. Greenwood writes an intriguing story, but I wouldn't call it engrossing. Thought was provoked, but soon forgotten.

Yeah, I still don't know how I feel about this. I am not hitting "one click" on my Kindle so I guess that says a lot. I guess. Who knows. I never have written "I guess" so many times.

I guess, though, I am glad I read it. But I doubt I will read more.

[cathyskye · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Having already sampled and enjoyed Greenwood's Phryne Fisher series, I looked forward to this book with anticipation, but found Earthly Delights to be very uneven. I loved the setting in Corinna's bakery, the descriptions of bread making, and the creation of new recipes for muffins and the like. Corinna's eccentric neighbors in the very unusual Roman-style apartment complex known as Insula were also interesting and brought a lot to the story what few times they appeared. The only real exception to this list of secondary characters was Jase the homeless boy, who did share the spotlight with Corinna more. Jase's skill in experimenting with food and his growing relationship with Corinna really lit up the book. Also, the feeling of contentment and well-being whenever Corinna talked about the life she'd made for herself was a plus. However, there were a couple of things that really dulled my enjoyment.The only real Australian flavor in the book comes from an occasional slang term like "arvo" ("afternoon") and too many Australian political references at the beginning that meant absolutely nothing to me. There wasn't that much investigating done either-- partly as a result of Corinna's being tied to the bakery for long periods of time. The identities of the perpetrators in the subplots were rather easily guessed as well. This first book reads more like a character study of Corinna and her romance with a handsome stranger named Daniel. Perhaps it was because Corinna was so satisfied with her life, but Earthly Delights lacked any sort of real spark to engage me enough to continue with the series.

[sleepydumpling_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Another fantastic Corinna Chapman book by Kerry Greenwood. Corinna is possibly my favourite heroine. She's smart, sassy, successful, surrounded by friends and has a beautiful man in her life... all while being a fat woman. Positive fat heroines are really difficult to find.Kerry Greenwood writes with wit, intelligence and fantastic descriptives. The Corinna Chapman books are definitely going into my permanent collection sooner rather than later.

[paideiamom · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I still don't know what I think of this story.

I read it all, relatively quickly.
With each press on the Kindle, I wondered why I was still reading it, but read it I did.

I think it was a romance. Well, "I love yous" were exchanged.

I think there was a mystery, people died and people almost died and people were arrested.

There were some vampires. They were fake, but they thought they were real.

There was some baking done. And recipes dutifully appended to the end.

These are all elements I usually enjoy, but...

I liked the characters. There was nothing to dislike about them. You saw the positive, not the negative. You saw what you were told, not what you could intuit. I guess this is a way of saying I saw no depth. I have no idea why the H would fall in love with the h, except of course for what he said, she looked hale and healthy and like she would age nicely as rounded as she was. Even the h is not sure why she fell in love with the H. I mean, as she said, she didn't know him.

The murders were solved, but they weren't so much murder as providing the weapon, heroin. Then there was an almost murder, but the murderer was found before the death occurred.

And then it ended and we were presented with recipes. Okay. Done. I guess everybody was just done.

So yeah, I liked it, I guess. I have never had to use the Kindle dictionary as much as I did in this one. I looked up words and gods and concepts and poets and constellation and Goth-isms.

Ms. Greenwood writes an intriguing story, but I wouldn't call it engrossing. Thought was provoked, but soon forgotten.

Yeah, I still don't know how I feel about this. I am not hitting "one click" on my Kindle so I guess that says a lot. I guess. Who knows. I never have written "I guess" so many times.

I guess, though, I am glad I read it. But I doubt I will read more.

[leslie398 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Really 3 1/2 stars. Very enjoyable cozy set in Melbourne featuring a baker and her somewhat oddball neighbors. I did figure out the culprit before the end, which I don't usually.

[2wondery_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Cozy mysteries are an occasional junk-food read for me, and listening in the car is a good way to pass the time. This feels more like a romance, with the protagonist a middle aged large-built woman meeting Mr. Dreamy. It was perfectly fine till Greenwood described Sidney as so hilly that it's not level except at the railway station platform and on tabletops. Cracked me up!! Now I want the print version to discover other gold nuggets. The author also kudos a fellow Aussie author, Jade Forrester. Sadly, Forrester's books have not made it across the Pacific pond.

[annarellix-322425 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Great if you want to unwind, have some good time, laugh.

[devilish2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Amusing, fun, light and in need of a bit more editing. Corinna is a large baker who lives in a building of interesting people. There are also interesting things going on with junkies, nerds, Wiccan witches, Goths and obnoxious graffiti. Corinna asks questions and ends up in some interesting situations.

[kcollett_6 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

First of a series of very nice mysteries, with baking, set in present-day Australia. Corinna has to figure out who is terrorizing the women in her eccentric apartment building, and whether it's related to the deaths of young heroine addicts.

[Jay Hunter · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

not bad. kind of fun wiht the science fiction and fantasy fan references. it's a little too "mary sue" for my tastes.

[heatherlinc · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A light, fun read which reminded me of the Stephanie Plum series. My favourite character, by far, was Horatio, Corrina's house cat, closely followed by the mouse police, Heckle and Jeykll. The human characters weren't bad either!

[jetangen4571 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

cosy-mystery, ex-military, law-enforcement, wannabes, amateur-sleuth, Australia, murder, situational-humor, verbal-humor I read the last book in series first, and now want to know everything about the quirky characters, the very retro apartment building, and the Mouse Police! Great plot with lots of unexpected twists and suspense. The depiction of the drug scene and small group efforts to help are so very timely, so too the alternative Goth scene, pedophiles, and the positive aspects of Wicca. But it's also very funny. I loved it! Louise Siverson is absolutely amazing as the voice performer!