Mystery Series: Corinna Chapman

With the news of the death of Kerry Greenwood at the start of the week, I felt moved to embark on a reread of her contemporary mystery series set in Melbourne. It’s been a while since I read them, but I was still surprised to see that I hadn’t written about them here – especially given how much I’ve written about the delightful Phryne Fisher. So today I’m remedying that.

Corinna Chapman is a baker in Melbourne. She owns and runs her own bakery which is in the same building she lives in: a delightful creation of an apartment building called Insula. Built in the 1920s by someone with a bit of a fixation on the Romans when it came to design. On top of that, each apartment is named after a different Roman God and it has a delightful roof garden too. I would move in myself except that across the course of the books quite a lot of drama happens in the building and its environs.

The first book in the series is nearly 20 years old now, so there are some bits here that are a little dated, but Corinna is such a wonderful creation. She is a reformed accountant, divorced, a reluctant sleuth and happy in herself despite society telling her that she should be miserable because she weighs too much. This is written in the first person so you’re inside her head the whole time and her personal monologue is idiosyncratic and wry. The other residents of the building and in Corinna’s life are also amusing and fun. And of course there are murders to solve. Often more than one of them too – in the first book for example Corinna finds herself investigating who is terrorising the women of her building but also who is killing off heroin addicts in Melbourne.

There are seven of these, with the final book The Spotted Dog coming some years after the previous installment which had lead me to hope that we might still get another one, but it seems that wasn’t meant to be. So I shall console myself with a reread. I’ve never seen these in paperback in the wild here in the UK as far as I can remember, but the good news for the rest of you is that the first one and the third one are in Kindle Unlimited in the UK at the moment, even if I don’t much like the new covers they’ve been given.

Have a great weekend everyone.