FICTION
Released: June 14, 2005
"And who else would trouble to inform us that "The Emperor Justinian, . . . believed that homosexuality caused earthquakes"? Sheer readerly bliss."
The lives, loves and (numerous) eccentricities of the residents of an Edinburgh boardinghouse.
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FICTION
Released: Jan. 4, 2005
"Though the first story is piffle, the second is a worthy apotheosis for Smith's charmingly clueless pedagogue. (Illus. throughout with b&w block prints)"
Smith completes the saga of Prof. Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld (see below) with a pair of long stories that transport him to Cambridge University and a faded Colombia salon.
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FICTION
Released: April 18, 2006
"The dénouement, which brings Mma Ramotswe face to face with evil, is the perfect climax to a tale as refreshing as a month in the country--the country of Botswana."
A seventh bulging file of cases for Mma Precious Ramotswe and the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, most of them offering no hope of profit except to lucky readers.
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FICTION
Released: Oct. 12, 2010
"A powerful demonstration of Smith's ability to dramatize the ways everyday situations spawn the ethical dilemmas that keep philosophers in business."
Edinburgh moral philosopher Isabel Dalhousie's seventh round of adventures among ethical conundrums (
The Lost Art of Gratitude, 2009, etc.) marks her finest hour to date.
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FICTION
Released: June 21, 2011
"Like Henry James, Smith clearly believes that relations stop nowhere; unlike James, he seems determined to trace every single one of them to its vanishing point."
Seventy-eight more slices of low-key comedy, originally serialized in the
Daily Telegraph, concerning the denizens of Pimlico's Corduroy Mansions and their lovers, friends and unavoidable relatives.
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FICTION
Released: July 11, 2006
"Vintage Smith, of a body and bouquet that even Bruce would appreciate."
Further adventures of the inhabitants of the Edinburgh townhouse that provided the primary setting for this novel's beguiling predecessor,
44 Scotland Street (2005).
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FICTION
Released: Sept. 20, 2005
"Beneath the slender mystery is a celebration of Isabel's fallible but resolutely ethical approach to life, charming and light but with a refreshingly unapologetic gravitas."
Gently starchy Edinburgh ethicist Isabel Dalhousie (
The Sunday Philosophy Club, 2004) slips into another sedate but vexing mystery.
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FICTION
Released: April 19, 2005
"Smith maintains the most civilized standards in the annals of detective fiction. But now, for the first time, he plots as if he actually means it."
The finest hour yet for Botswana's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, which is tracking a defalcating Zambian financier even though it "preferred to deal with more domestic matters."
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FICTION
Released: Sept. 22, 2009
Inspired and encouraged by verses from W.H. Auden, Edinburgh philosopher Isabel Dalhousie again confronts wickedness masquerading as mere crime.
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FICTION
Released: Sept. 28, 2004
Smith puts the chronicles of Botswana's No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency on hold to explore an equally civilized Edinburgh criminal scene that Ian Rankin's DI John Rebus would never recognize.
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FICTION
Released: April 29, 2003
"Readers who haven't yet discovered Mma Ramotswe will enjoy discovering how her quiet humor, understated observation, and resolutely domestic approach to detection promise to put Botswana on the sleuthing map for good."
It's a good thing that Precious Ramotswe (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, 2001, etc.) has consolidated the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency in anticipation of consolidating her personal life—moving its headquarters back of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, the establishment owned by Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, her fiancé—because the not-so-mean streets of Gaborone are teeming with problems only she can solve. Mr. Molofelo, a prosperous civil engineer from Lobatse, throws himself on her as a confessor, then asks her to find two women he wronged when he was a young man years ago: Tebogo Bathopi, the nursing student whom he insisted have the abortion he made necessary, and Mma Tsolamosese, the landlady whose radio he stole in order to finance the abortion.
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FICTION
Released: Jan. 5, 2010
Life goes on, and on in this fifth helping of luminously understated adventures for the denizens of 44 Scotland Street and environs.
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