Forbidden Fruit

I don't comment on every book I read, but I thought I ought to post something about Kerry Greenwood's Forbidden Fruit.   I can handle Kerry's Phryne Fisher (here, for example), but the "detective" in this book is Corinna Chapman.   I haven't read any of the previous Corinna Chapman books (I see that Forbidden Fruit is the 5th), so it took me a while to get up to speed on some of the context of this story.  Even allowing for this, I'm sorry, but Corinna is just too over-the-top for me.  Yes, there are some familiar place names, but there's too much food stuff, too many way-out characters, too many pets (sorry, "companion animals"), too much over-done description of Melbourne's (largely imaginary) "street scene".

Perhaps there's an audience for all this, but I ended up skimming the pages looking for the "story" - such as it is.  The story meanders down numerous seemingly irrelevant byways and involves highly implausible characters.   The trials and errors in the making of making of glacé cherries seem to get as much attention as the search for the runaway kids......and anyway, there's a recipe for glacé cherries when (nearly 300 pages later) you get to the end.