A Distant View of Everything

June 1, 2017
Edinburgh philosopher Isabel Dalhousie's cases (The Novel Habits of Happiness, 2015, etc.) keep getting slighter and slighter. But her exceptionally well-titled 11th may be the slenderest of them all.Beatrice Shandon has a problem. At one of the dinner parties in which she constantly seeks to mingle friends who already know each other with new people from outside their circle, she introduced Constance Macdonald, an acquaintance who'd been pressing for an invitation, to plastic surgeon Tony MacUspaig. Connie took instantly to Tony, but Bea now has reservations. More than reservations: she suspects that Tony may be a psychopath with a history of romancing wealthy women in order to extract money from them. Bea's no good at all at working out problems like this; could Isabel, her old school friend, help? With an alacrity that puts Connie's monumentally hesitant statement of the case to shame, Isabel agrees. Soon she's chatting with Rob McLaren, the dinner guest who knew Tony from St. Andrews University; with Tony's ex-girlfriend Andrea Murray, who reportedly attempted suicide after their breakup; and with his more recent friend Tricia Ferguson, who gave him 50,000 pounds from the trust fund her husband left her. But these inquiries don't drive the story. Much more important are interludes in which Isabel reads letters to the editor of the Scotsman, offers money to a stranger whose bicycle has just been wrecked by a charging dog, and chats about this and that with Tricia Ferguson's lawyer, who seems to have come to his office specifically in hopes that this irresistibly engaging conversationalist will drop in. Significantly, neither Connie Macdonald nor Tony MacUspaig ever appears in person. "I have a tendency, I'm afraid, to think at a bit of a tangent," the heroine confesses. Like-minded readers will fasten onto her latest plot-seasoned ruminations as manna from heaven.

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June 1, 2017
Of the endlessly inventive McCall Smith's three longest-running seriesthe No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, 44 Scotland Street, and the Isabel Dalhousie novelsthe Dalhousie series may be the one that's hardest to get into. It's hard not to love gutsy Precious Ramotswe, founder of the Botswana detective agency, and it's hard to resist the denizens of Edinburgh's Scotland Street as their lives collide. But Isabel is a different matter. She's an Edinburgh philosopher, left a fortune by her father and a gorgeous husband by fate. She's a bit standoffish and very wrapped up in her thoughts, which constantly intrude on the action. The latest has a promising plot opener, with a matchmaker friend of Isabel's begging her to investigate whether a plastic surgeon she's fixed up with a wealthy friend is actually a psychopath. But the plotline just about sinks from view for most of the book, as Isabel muses and converses. There's enough of McCall Smith's trenchant wit to see the reader through, but this will appeal only to committed Dalhousie fans.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)

March 1, 2017

Even as Isabel Dalhousie tries to convince little Charlie that his new baby brother is a reason for joy, she's approached by matchmaker Rosemary Hipple, who's regretting a match she proposed between a cosmetic surgeon and a banker after hearing rumors about the former.

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