Darcy Finnegan greets us from a lively new destination, Sydney, Australia. She’s on honeymoon, if she did have to wait a few months while her husband Marcus tackled his job with Interpol. MURDER BY MERINGUE is the last thing you’d expect while honeymooning.

As a travelling food writer, Darcy is delighted to fit in a dessert contest amid the harbour lights. Winter is cold enough here, and people dress for it. Pavlova, a dessert featuring meringue, cream, fruit and maybe decorative glazes or sprinkles, seems a fitting, if rich, end to a meal. The dessert was created to honour the ballerina Anna Pavlova. The Vivid Sydney festival features a contest as a highlight, but the judge, Julian "Jules" Ransom, is highly opinionated and dislikes just about everyone he’s met previously, which includes photojournalist Lizzie.

Lizzie normally works with Darcy, but since this was a last-minute assignment and Darcy was on leave, another writer, Vivienne, has been assigned to the work. Lizzie could not resist bringing Darcy’s dog Mozart which she was dog-sitting. To me, it doesn’t sound fair to the dog to haul him halfway around the world, but the books would not be the same without him. New readers can start here perfectly well.

After the usual suspicious death, some of the larger than life characters in the catering industry are under examination by Detective Nguyen, a sharp local lady. Darcy gets to make a friend, Bluey, a typical outback Aussie. He takes her to the dockside, where they check up on sugar freight and see if the high standards everyone claims for their products are genuine.

The recipe for pavlova at the end sounds – you know what, I’m just going to go and make that now. Enjoy the read, MURDER BY MERINGUE by Greta Sinclair; enjoy the descriptive writing and exciting adventure at Sydney harbourside. Mmm, the fruit and cream.