My expectations for Corinna Chapman, master baker and reluctant investigator, were not unrealistic. Like the svelte Phryne, the fat Corinna has a handsome lover, an offsider with a troubled past, two dippy female charges, and cats. Despite a supporting cast of eccentric denizens who share Corinna’s city apartment block, however, Cooking the Books reads as if it has been squeezed from a sausage machine: repetitive and thin.

How many times do we need to be told that Daniel is ‘gorgeous’ and that Corinna (size twenty) can’t believe her luck? Food, bread, and sex, which is thankfully left to the reader’s imagination, are too often described as ‘delightful’ or ‘yum’.  Corinna’s routines – early rise, coffee, baking, second coffee, nap – are not interesting enough to be so frequently repeated, yet the dramatic possibilities of the television soapie set, where Corinna is temporarily employed, are largely unrealised. The mysterious sabotaging of the show’s star and her search for a long-lost child have equally unlikely resolutions.

Corinna makes a few tenuous connections to decipher the nursery rhyme clues left by a homeless man during Daniel’s search for missing bearer bonds. She leads us, like a tour guide, through the streets of Melbourne’s CBD to various landmarks and statues. That the scraps of paper remain where the old man stows them, given Melbourne’s reputation for rain, wind, and cleanliness, is one coincidence too many.

To quote a minor character: ‘Eventually the public will realise that the tired old recipes don’t cut it anymore.’ Packaging the novel with Corinna’s recipes fails to compensate for this formulaic soft-core detective story.