As you may have seen from yesterday’s Week in Books, I had a bit of a strange week reading last week, having trouble settling down to books – and a few that I didn’t like. But choosing this week’s BotW was easy – Kerry Greenwood’s Earthly Delights.
You might recognise Kerry Greenwood’s name because she’s the author of the Phryne Fisher series of murder mysteries set in 1920s Australia, which I adore and have been turned into a TV series – which I have thoughts about. This the first in her Corinna Chapman series – which is set in present day (or at least present day when they were written a few years back) Melbourne, where Corinna is a speciality baker who runs her own bakery in one of the slightly seedier areas. The bakery is proving a success, but suddenly she’s getting anonymous letters calling her a whore, a junkie has overdosed in the alley behind her shop, there’s a mysterious but gorgeous man showing an interest in her and her shop assistants are starving themselves to try and get a role on a TV show (any TV show). She’s determined to get to the bottom of the letters – which are upsetting and scaring her and her friends – and ends up getting sucked in to some of the other drama as well…
Although this is the first in the series, I had already read one of the later books and enjoyed it although I was missing some backstory. This fills some of those gaps in nicely and sets up the series as well as having an excellent mystery. Greenwood always creates great settings and quirky characters in the Phryne books – and she does the same here. Corinna is very different to Phryne, but she’s great fun, smart and warm-hearted, just like Miss Fisher. Her apartment building is a brilliantly quirky invention – as are many of the people who live there.
I didn’t love this the way that I love Phryne, but in the absence of a new book about the Fabuous Miss Fisher, I’ll happily work my way through these. I’ve been waiting for either the kindle price or the second hand price to drop on this series for ages – and these have all dropped from over £5 for the Kindle edition to just over £3, which is still on the top end of what I’m prepared to pay for ebooks, but is much more doable. I shouldn’t really be buying books, but when has that ever stopped me before. You can pick up your copy on Kindle or Kobo (which isn’t price-matching Amazon at time of writing sadly), in paperback from Amazon (if you’re prepared to shell out £11+ for a new copy or £8+ for a second hand one) or you can trawl the second hand shops because it’s out of stock and un-orderable at both Foyles and Waterstones.
Happy reading.
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 
Stumbled across you via your post about my mate Christina Jones – I agree with every word, of course! – and was delighted to find this, as I’m very fond of the Corinna series. Very interesting blog.
Thank you Lesley – much appreciated.