Devil's Food
A Corinna
Chapman Mystery
Kerry
Greenwood
Poisoned Pen Press (Hardcover)
ISBN-10: 1-59058-428-7 (1590584287)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59058-428-6 (9781590584286)
Publication Date: May 2009
List Price: $24.95
Synopsis (from
the publisher): If there’s one thing 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 just-baked, freshly buttered sourdough
bread to enjoy. So when a strange cult which denies the flesh and eats
only famine bread turns up and a malnourished corpse is found in a
park, Corinna is very disturbed indeed.
But she doesn’t only have that to contend with. Her hippie
mother, Starshine, has turned up out of the blue, hysterical that
Sunlight, Corinna’s father, has absconded to Melbourne with all
their money and a desire for a new young lover. Meanwhile, someone is
also poisoning people with weight loss herbal teas. And odd things are
happening at the nearby Cafe Vlad Tepes, which attracts a very strange
clientele.
Altogether, it’s a delicious recipe for murder, mayhem and
mystery.
Review: Corinna
Chapman is a walking advertisement for her Earthly Delights Bakery.
She’s fat, sassy, hip-swinging, and proud of it. She loves to
sample the soups, muffins, cakes and cookies that she and her staff of
three dispense daily from her Melbourne shop. And for the icing on her
cake, she’s got a frequent-visitor boyfriend, a Jewish PI named,
Daniel, who she helps to solve crimes when they aren’t indulging
in her bedroom delights. In Devil’s
Food, the third of their Australian adventures, Corinna’s
menu includes a delightfully entertaining concoction of a cold cult, a
missing father in mid-life pursuit of sweeties, a mother in pursuit of
her nutty, naughty husband, a sprinkling of smugglers of toxic herbal
tea, and a madman with his own recipe for murder most foul.
Between dispensing tidbits about her sex life, Australian society, and
the history of Melbourne, and living high off the hog, so to speak,
Corinna tells her story of the quirky characters around her–sweet
and sour–and of the daily operations of her bakery. Even the cats
have their personas, from the bakery’s Mouse Police, to
Corinna’s Horatio, to Lucifer–“the Cat Most Likely To
Be Found in Trouble.” The ensemble cast of characters is equally
interesting, from narrator Corinna, of course; to her staff members,
the teenaged-girls, Goss and Kylie; and the fifteen-year-old reformed
drug addict and apprentice baker, Jason; to Daniel, who specializes in
finding missing children and annoying the local cops; to Meroe,
“a jobbing witch;” to Jon and Kepler, a homosexual couple;
to Mistress Dread, Mrs. Dawson, Professor Knox, the Pandamus family,
and a trio of nerds, Taz, Rat and Gully, who run an electronics repair
shop at irregular hours and with monkey business around the edges. Two
crusty cops, Kane and Reagan, make cameo appearances and appear to be
as inept as the worst of any in North American literature while Father
Hungerford and his cult followers of Frates
Discarnati, dining on famine bread of lentils and not much else,
are equally weird. But the bane of Corinna’s existence is her
parents, her father, Sunlight, who has disappeared and she must find,
and her mother, Starshine, who appears unannounced on her doorstep and
she must tolerate. While Corinna goes about solving the mysteries of
her missing father and the apparent poisoning of her two shop
assistants with a diet tea, an ominous note reverberates at the end of
most chapters to announce the progress of “the man who was
becoming a murderer” until he strikes, and Corinna is left with
another sticky mess to clean up.
A repast of light-hearted fare, Greenwood’s, Devil’s Food is spiced up
with the saucy bits about Corinna’s bedroom antics and her
devil-may-care attitude to fasting, dietary fads and such foolishness.
Corinna has found her voice–even if she takes a while to find her
father and a murderer- and it’s all about her appetite for food,
drink, and fun. It’s a voice of plenty, too, with frequent
references to food and drink, and complete with a couple of end-page
recipes, one for “Lemon and Lentil Soup,” the other for
“Persian Delights-Oriental Fruits.” A minor hiccup, though,
for this fruitful Australian read from an author “who lives with
a Wizard”–there’s a fair dusting of down under slang
to digest before Corinna and company devour their last slice of
Devil’s Food cake, savour their last drink, toast the end of
their third adventure, and begin salivating for whatever’s next
on their plate.
Kerry Greenwood has more than twenty novels to her credit, and has won
the Ned Kelly Lifetime Achievement Award from the Crime Writers’
Association of Australia. The author of the acclaimed Phryne Fisher
series, she frequently works as an advocate for the Australian Legal
Aid Commission.
Special thanks to M. Wayne Cunningham (mw_cunningham@telus.net) for contributing his review of Devil's Food and to Poisoned Pen Press for providing an ARC of the book for this review.
Review Copyright © 2009 — M. Wayne Cunningham — All Rights Reserved — Reprinted with Permission
Have you read Devil's Food? How would you rate it?
Mysteries in this series ...
Earthly Delights
Poisoned Pen Press (Hardcover), June 2007
ISBN-10: 1-59058-393-0 (1590583930)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59058-393-7 (9781590583937)
Heavenly Pleasures
Poisoned Pen Press (Hardcover), June 2008
ISBN-10: 1-59058-426-0 (1590584260)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59058-426-2 (9781590584262)
Devil's Food
Poisoned Pen Press (Hardcover), May 2009
ISBN-10: 1-59058-428-7 (1590584287)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59058-428-6 (9781590584286)
Trick or Treat
Poisoned Pen Press (Hardcover), October 2009
ISBN-10: 1-59058-532-1 (1590585321)
ISBN-13: 978-1-59058-532-0 (9781590585320)
Omnimystery keywords for Devil's Food ...
Location(s) referenced: Melbourne, Australia.
