Alexander McCall Smith, The Sunday Philosophy Club

I've been a fan of Alexander McCall Smith's Botswana books for years and have read a great number of them, but I'm new to his Sunday Philosophy Club series, of which The Sunday Philosophy Club is the first installment. Isabel Dalhousie is a moral philosopher, the editor of the Review of Applied Ethics. She is middle-aged and unmarried but has a beloved niece nearby in Edinburgh. Her life is civilized—tea and crosswords and lectures and concerts—but she evidently has a knack for insinuating herself in other people's affairs. And so, in this outing, she winds up looking into the death of a young man she saw falling from the balcony of a concert hall one evening.

Isabel Dalhousie is not completely unlike Precious Ramotswe, the protagonist of the author's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books. But Precious's wisdom is homespun, and she is herself the salt of the earth. Isabel's insights come from Cambridge lectures and philosophy treatises. Not my cup of tea, and so the observations in this book appeal to me less than Precious Ramotswe's lower-brow offerings. I'm torn as to whether I'll read more in this series. I enjoyed the read, and I liked Isabel Dalhousie, but I did not love her.