Corinna Chapman Books in Order

The Corinna Chapman series shifts Kerry Greenwood's crime fiction into present day Melbourne and swaps flapper dresses for flour dusted aprons. Corinna is a tall, unapologetically fat baker who runs the Earthly Delights bakery on the ground floor of the Insula, a quirky Roman style apartment block just off a central city lane.

After walking away from an overbearing husband and a high stress accounting job, Corinna has built herself a life that revolves around bread, cats, and a tight knit community of neighbours. She gets up before dawn, kneads dough with her assistants and two mouser cats for company, then opens the doors to a steady stream of locals in need of good sourdough and a sympathetic ear.

The mysteries arrive uninvited. In Earthly Delights a string of overdoses brings police and danger to her doorstep, while someone is sending vicious letters to the women of the Insula. Later books see Corinna dealing with poisoned chocolates, sinister diet cults, a cut throat franchise bakery moving in nearby, reality television chaos on a cooking show, and a missing dog that pulls her into the troubles of an immigrant family.

What links the books is less a formula of puzzle plots and more a recurring world. The Insula is filled with distinctive residents: Meroe the witch and herbalist, computer geeks, struggling actors, a retired classics professor, elderly eccentrics, and the assorted waifs and strays Corinna collects. Over the series she also builds a steady, tender relationship with Daniel, a private investigator who spends his nights doing the soup run for Melbourne's homeless.

These novels sit on the cosy end of crime but never pretend the city is tidy. Greenwood writes frankly about addiction, homelessness, mental illness, family estrangement, and religious extremism, while still offering plenty of comfort in the form of baking, friendship, and wry humour. Recipes sometimes make an appearance, and Corinna's love of food is treated as a source of joy rather than guilt.

Readers who enjoy strong sense of place will find laneways, trams, markets, and office towers sharing space with rooftop gardens and hidden courtyards. The tone is warm, funny, and grounded, with most of the violence happening offstage and the focus firmly on how a community responds.

You can begin with Earthly Delights and read forward, watching Corinna's world expand, or dip into later volumes for particular storylines. However you approach it, the series offers the pleasure of hanging out in a slightly shabby apartment building where the coffee is strong, the bread is excellent, and the people mostly look out for one another.