There's baking involved, cats are anthropomorphised and there are a few mysteries to be solved. Yes, all of the classic cozy ingredients are in place in Earthly Delights, the first book of Kerry Greenwood's series featuring Corinna Chapman. Kerry Greenwood is better known for her long running Phryne Fisher series, but has taken a break from the 1920's with the introduction of the delightful Corinna.

Corinna Chapman is a comfortably overweight former accountant who now revels in her self-employment, getting up early each morning to do what she loves, producing a wide variety of breads, health loaves, baguettes and muffins. She's accompanied by her 3 cats (Horatio and the Mice Police - Heckle and Jeckle) and is happy to bask in the feeling of immense satisfaction with the way her life is going.

Corinna's daily routine is interrupted suddenly when she comes across an overdosed junkie on her back doorstep, a girl whom she barely manages to keep alive before the paramedics arrive. Also arriving on the scene is Daniel, a dishy volunteer who works with the underprivileged homeless around the streets of Melbourne. Daniel helps to calm the ungrateful, recently revived junkie down and then proceeds to make Corinna's stomach do all sorts of flip-flops when he shows more than just a casual interest in her. She doesn't know much about Daniel, but she knows enough to want to see more of him.

It looks very likely that this early morning excitement is the latest victim of a killer who has been giving heroin hotshots to the junkies around Melbourne with three already dead and this one a near miss. Thanks to her involvement in saving Suze's life, Corinna feels as though she has a stake in stopping this killer.

But Corinna and her fellow apartment residents have problems that are a little closer to home. The female residents seem to have picked up a stalker who has been sending them letters quoting from the bible and warning that they will be punished for their sins. When the harassment escalates to obscene graffiti painted on their shop fronts they begin to take their attacker more seriously. With time on her hands and at the persuasive urging of the imposing Mistress Dread, Corinna tries a little bit of quiet investigating to see if she can unearth their secret tormentor.

As if her life hasn't become hectic enough, Jase, a 15 year old former heroin addict has begun to visit Corinna's bakery looking for work. He has latched on to her after noticing Daniel talking to her and taking his acceptance as a seal of approval. She starts him off washing the floors and begins a gradual progression of trust and responsibility that follows a rocky but rewarding course.

Combined together here is a story that contains a number of interesting small storylines all revolving around a central character who is practical and sensible without ever slipping over to annoying sanctimony. Her role is complemented nicely by the diverse array of characters that pop in and out of the story adding up to a free flowing story that easily sucks you along with it.

The tone of Earthly Delights contains just the right level of whimsy to make it feel good natured, setting up the more dangerous moments to contain even greater menace. It would have been easy to have made this a completely light-hearted romp, but that hasn't happened. Delicate social issues such as drug abuse, homelessness and prejudice are raised and handled competently without ever breaking the stride of the main story.

The multi-faceted nature of the story gives it immediate appeal, but it's the eclectic character line-up that had me absolutely captivated. If it wasn't Meroe, the Wiccan witch casting a purity spell, it was Mistress Dread, the striking dominatrix who owned the nearby leather shop scaring the pants off everyone. Then tucked away in other parts of the apartment building there's a dapper retired professor, a trio of spacey computer geeks and the inevitable cranky old busybody. Add the enigmatic love interest, Daniel and Jase and you have as diverse a group of characters as you're ever likely to come across and all of them add a definite spice to the story.

The only disappointing aspect to the story was that I found it very easy to figure out both who the junkie killer was and who Corinna's stalker was. That being said, seeing as how the protagonist is a baker and not a private investigator, one would expect the mystery to be relatively easy to solve, I suppose. When all is said and done, I was more interested in how Corinna and her bakery fared at story's end which is a tribute to the effort that has gone into the characterisations.

For the baking-minded reader, Greenwood has also included a couple of recipes of the more delicious sounding pastry delights in the book. One is for Plum Pudding Muffins and the other for Herb Scrolls. She also adds tips to ensure that your muffins are always light and fluffy as well as how to grow your own yeast to keep as a starter for when you bake your own bread.

I should point out, now that you've worked your way to the bottom of this review, my reading preference leans decidedly to the hardboiled edge of the crime fiction spectrum. Earthly Delights, with its cats and baking and love story should not have appealed to me, or so I thought, but it definitely did. I found that when I reached the end of the book I was keen to read more. I wanted to find out how young Jason fares as Corinna's apprentice, I want to know more about Daniel and I definitely want to know more about Mistress Dread! Fortunately there are 2 more books (so far) that should go some way towards satisfying my curiosity.