The Sunday Philosophy Club
An Isabel Dalhousie Mystery
By Alexander McCall Smith

    2004 will be marked down as the year in which I discovered Alexander McCall Smith and his wonderful tales of the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency. Like Harry Potter (with which it has nothing in common) these stories seem to fill some space inside us that most modern fiction, be it gritty or airy, fails to reach. I could write many pages on why this is so in my opinion (here's a clue: something to do with being neither gritty nor airy) but this is not what I am reviewing. Fans of Precious Ramotswe held their breath when it was announced that their author had written book one in a new series and here it is.

    Forty-something and single, Isabel Dalhousie is a lady of independent means. She fills her days with visits to the theatre and the art gallery, buying paintings, spending time with her cousin Cat who owns a deli and generally enjoying herself in a quiet, intellectual way. One night at the theatre she sees a man fall to his death from the balcony and feels she has a moral right to find out if he fell or was pushed. Marshaling her innate common sense, formidable knowledge of philosophy and her cousin's ex-boyfriend she hits the streets of Edinburgh to find out whodunit.

    Botswana seems exotic enough, but Isabel's genteel Edinburgh full of wealthy lawyers and financiers, ladies who lunch and intense culture seems like a distant star. Perhaps this is the fascination of this book, which lacks the charm and easy good humor of his more famous series. You don't read it for the whodunit alone - although I didn't guess it all - but for Smith's meticulous delineation of a culture. He immerses the reader in it from page one, backed up by all those philosophical musings of the protagonist. It is like peering into a fish tank and seeing a whole world you vaguely knew existed but had not previously witnessed, and as such it is all rather fascinating. Would Smith have shot to fame on this book alone? No, I don't think so but worth a read all the same for the reasons stated above.