Devil's Food

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.

( )

Transferred from my spreadsheet to Goodreads

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.
( )

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. ( )

“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. ( )