Dead Man’s Chest is the 18th book in the Phryne Fisher series by popular Australian author, Kerry Greenwood. It is January, and Phryne has decided to take her family to Queenscliff on holiday while her bathroom is renovated. But their arrival at the beachside house borrowed from Mr Thomas, an ant...
Over all the novel was rather good. [Hopefully no spoilers]LIN CHUNG - First off, I was extremely glad that Lin Chung made a reappearance. Like Phryne I've grown fond of the china man and was sorely disappointing in his less than prominent appearance in the last few books. He does make a grand [a...
This is the 20th book in the Phryne Fisher Mystery series. It is 1929 in Australia and Phryne is asked to help solve the murder of a conductor. She agrees and becomes a member of the choir. While doing that she also helps an old friend from WWI become more alive in the land of the living. Lots of...
The Hon. Phryne Fisher, even after 20 novels, remains true to herself in this latest mystery in which she even joins a chorus to sing Mendelssohn’s Elijah, exhibiting yet another talent to her apparently unlimited repertoire. The reason she undertakes the task is because not one but two conducto...
In addition to the short stories featuring popular 1920's detective Phryne Fisher, this volume includes a few recipes and illustrations of her hats, shoes, and of course her adorable self. Almost all are set in Australia, and include Phryne thwarting a blackmailer, finding a lost hat, lusting af...
It's Christmas, and Phryne has an invitation to the Last Best party of 1928, a four-day extravaganza being held at Werribee Manor house and grounds by the Golden Twins, Isabella and Gerald Templar. She knew them in Paris, where they caused a sensation. Phryne is in two minds about going when she ...
We arrived on Miss Fisher’s doorstep in a “bass-akward” kind of manner: first by the television series from Australian Broadcasting being “recommended” by the Affinity Engine in Netflix, and then discovering that there is a whole shelf of books following the Honorable Phryne Fisher through her ca...
I first heard of Kerry Greenwood a few years ago - her series of mystery books focusing on Phryne Fisher was presented amongst various cozy mysteries, this kind of mystery which prohibits swear words, sex or violence. I was then between two minds - on the one hand, it seemed really I wasn't the ...
Phryne Fisher is doing one of her favorite things --dancing at the Green Mill (Melbourne's premier dance hall) to the music of Tintagel Stone's Jazzmakers, the band who taught St Vitus how to dance. And she's wearing a sparkling lobelia-coloured georgette dress. Nothing can flap the unflappable P...
Driving home late one night, Phryne Fisher is surprised when someone shoots out her windscreen. When she alights she finds a pretty young man with an anarchist tattoo dying on the tarmac just outside the dock gates. He bleeds to death in her arms, and all over her silk shirt. Enraged by the loss ...
Greenwood brings several threads to this story of murder, greed and mayhem, and weaves them together in a jazz pattern. Phryne's sister Beth arrives from England all unexplained, and so abrasive and obnoxious that Phryne hardly recognises her. She leaps at the post and refuses to explain what's w...
On her way to the theatre, Phryne and her friend Bunji rescue an old Chinese woman from some thugs. In thanks, the woman and her son take her to their home for a reviving tot of cognac and a quick clean of their clothes. Phryne is immaculate, as always, but Bunji went all in and tore her stocking...
Oh, Phyrne, how much do I love you? A lot. From your unabashed sexual prowling to a decor sense that includes nude paintings of yourself, to the consideration that causes you to buy pretty things for your maid, you are a fine person.It turns out that you also solve mysteries, understand (but disl...
Alongside the synopsis given by Goodreads above, there is also a second case involving the disappearance of a wealthy young woman, Elizabeth Chambers, who has just returned from Paris. Her intended fiancé, M’sieur Anatole, asks Phryne to investigate and she discovers that Elizabeth's father, raci...
When the 1920s' most glamorous lady detective, the Honourable Miss Phryne Fisher, arranges to go to Ballarat for the week, she eschews the excitement of her red Hispano-Suiza racing car for the sedate safety of the train. The last thing she expects is to have to use her trusty Beretta .32 to save...
Phryne Fisher is bored. Life appears to be too easy, too perfect. Her household is ordered, her love life is pleasant, the weather is fine. And then a man from her past arrives at the door. It is Alan Lee from the carnival. Alan and his friends want her to investigate strange happenings at Farrel...
Baking is an alchemical process for Corinna Chapman. At four am she starts work at Earthly Delights, her bakery in Calico Alley. But one morning Corinna receives a threatening note saying "The wages of sin is death" and finds a syringe in her cat's paw. A blue-faced junkie has collapsed in the d...
Away with the fairies is a British saying, meaning that a person is a little bit mad, distracted, or in a dreamworld.Miss Fisher is all of things at the start of this novel. Her lover, Lin Chung has been sent back to China on a silk buying trip and hasn’t been in contact for a while. She is more ...
Ah Phryne Fisher, you just keep seducing me more with every book. (Uh oh. Now the next one will be a clinker... What was I thinking?)Actually, I thought this one was going to be a clinker for the first few chapters: Phryne starts out totally bitchy and not at all her inwardly snarky, outwardly co...
1928 St Kilda, brave fashionable Phryne Fisher has handmaidens for the Queen of the Flowers parade. Rose 13 runs away and is caught, then so is Phryne's adopted daughter Ruth, seeking her long-lost father. The circus brings old pal Dulcie with three elephants. Fiddler James Murray, lover from Phr...
'Who are you?' asked the doctor. 'You are not the standard cruise passenger, I can tell you that.' 'Thank you,' said Phryne in a self-possessed manner. 'You are correct. I am a lot of things, some of which do not concern you, but mostly I am Phryne Fisher.' The nice men at P&O are worried. A su...
Cassandra is the second in The Delphic Women trilogy.Doomed, magnificent Troy is burning...Cassandra, the golden-haired princess cursed with the gift of prophecy, and Diomenes, the Achaean with the healing hands, become puppets of the gods.Their passions are thwarted, their loves betrayed, their ...
'My sandals were made to glide over the marble floor of the Palace of Mycenae, not to walk the road like a common market trader. Of course, as a princess, I was unused to walking. Only female slaves and whore are seen in public. Only female slaves and whores walk.. Electra is the final book ...
Sorceress, Princess of Colchis, Securer of the Golden Fleece. Her very name is a byword for infamy. Legend has it that she murdered her own children for revenge. But love in Ancient Greece was often a dangerous game; and legends are not always what they seem. Medea, devoted wife of Jason, was...
Phryne Fisher loves dancing, especially with gorgeous young Simon Abrahams. But Phryne's contentment at the Jewish Young People's Society Dance is cut short when Simon's father asks her to investigate the strange death of a devout young student in Miss Sylvia Lee's bookshop located in the Eastern...
No one has less interest in mysteries than Corinna Chapman, who has bread to bake, but they seem to be arising spontaneously in the vicinity of her bakery, Earthly Delights. Between the mouthwatering distractions of loaves and muffins, of Jason her apprentice and Horatio the cat, she's keeping an...
If there's one thing that 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 very own, just-baked, freshly buttered sourdough bread to enjoy. So when a strange cult which den...
But she had cast aside her cloth when she came into her own rooms, and as she lay naked across her bed on the reed mat I saw one hand stray to her nipple and roll it gently, a self-caress full of sorrow. She had never been a ‘woman of a hundred lovers’ even when she had played with our cousin, he...
Tommy checked them off on her list. Today was quiches and pies, so I started on my pastry while Daniel drifted around the kitchen, first lending a hand with the salad people. I noted that he had his own knife, a Global by the look of it. Good knives. You can’t work in a kitchen unless you have a ...
Better be merry with the fruitful Grape Than sadden after none, or bitter, fruit. The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, stanza 39 From the days of the International Workers of the World onwards, Communists in Australia were relatively well organised, trade union based, most of them, and thus, well, yes, ...
Phryne nodded to the girls and they tasted it as well. Mint tea, unlike champagne, met with general approval. The jingling girl then offered a tray of Oriental sweets. Phryne chose a piece of what she had known as an insipid and gluey sweet called Turkish 208Queen of Flowers - Pages 16/3/04 4:38 ...
In fact, unless she stripped naked and ravished Daniel in front of my eyes, it couldn’t be as bad as I feared. I climbed the stairs of the Buildings slowly, carrying my backpack with my two bottles of wine, moving like someone invited to the deathbed of a dear friend. The office had been cleaned,...
GK Chesterton ‘The Donkey’ I have to go to bed early on Sunday because it’s the dreaded four am start on Monday, so Daniel and I dined modestly on cheese, salad and the remains of the alcohol. He had made efforts to trace the missing phone callers. I had made a note to buy some more brandy. An...
William Charles Wentworth, speech to the Legislative Council By the time Phryne arrived at the lodgings of that advanced young Modernist Chas Nuttall it was already three o’clock and she was getting tired. The slums were oppressing her spirits and what she had heard about Tillie Devine had not el...
Phryne trod slowly up the stairs, the lift being out of order, and knocked on a flimsy wooden door. Something loud and vaguely operatic was playing on a gramophone inside. Phryne knocked again. The door was flung open by a girl in a coat and hat. ‘Oh, good, dearie, you’re ...
We came down into Apollo Bay in the afternoon, me, Father and our donkey, Diligence, after we had delivered all our orders and sold out. We do this every couple of weeks. My great-grandfather set up Warrender’s Superfine Spices. We sell the best spices, herbs, medicines and necessities. The thing...