In his new mystery series, Alexander McCall Smith has moved a long
way from his comfort zone --- nearly 6,000 miles in fact, a number
that represents the distance from Gaborone, Botswana to Edinburgh,
Scotland. Botswana, as many readers surely know, is the setting for
Smith's immensely popular No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series
while Edinburgh is home to Smith's latest undertaking, THE SUNDAY
PHILOSOPHY CLUB, billed as an "Isabel Dalhousie mystery."

Isabel Dalhousie, a quiet woman of independent means and a certain
age, seems an unlikely gumshoe. As the editor of The Review of
Applied Ethics, Isabel would seem more at home in a university
philosophy department than dealing with the sordid details of
murder most foul. But we, as Isabel would certainly agree, do not
always choose our circumstances; at times they choose us.

In Isabel's case, circumstances cause her to witness an unfortunate
death, a young man's fall from a symphony hall balcony. "Her first
thought, curiously, was of Auden's poem on the fall of Icarus. Such
events, said Auden, occur against a background of people going
about their ordinary business. They do not look up and see the boy
falling from the sky. I was talking to a friend, she
thought. I was talking to a friend and the boy fell out of the
sky." Isabel decides she has a moral duty to investigate the
circumstances of the young man's death, being as she would have
been the last person he saw before his death.

The trail winds her through the worlds of Scottish art and high
finance before she reaches a conclusion. Along the way Isabel is
confounded by a bushel of moral dilemmas. Does she have a duty to
speak truthfully to a reporter who is bent on exploiting the grief
of the victim's family? Should she expose an unfaithful boyfriend
to a family member? And ultimately, once she discovers the truth of
the situation, what should she do with that knowledge?

Isabel's progress can be slightly ponderous at times. Deciding
whether or not she should even act at all takes up nearly the first
100 pages of Isabel's story, and since the book weighs in at only
247 pages, that's a high percentage of inaction. Once Isabel
finally does decide to get involved, the story picks up and Smith
provides more than enough red herrings to keep the reader guessing
until the very end. Since Isabel is a philosopher at heart, she
tends to analyze each and every situation from a philosophical
perspective. "There was a distinction between lying and telling
half-truths, but it was a very narrow one. Isabel had herself
written a short article on the matter, following the publication of
Sissela Bok's philosophical monograph, Lying. She had argued for a
broad interpretation, which imposed a duty to answer questions
truthfully, and not to hide facts which could give a different
complexion to the matter…" The tone is a bit daunting for
readers who never progressed beyond Philosophy 101 in
college.

Once one adjusts to the tone, it is easy to warm to THE SUNDAY
PHILOSOPHY CLUB. Isabel has quite a cast of characters orbiting
around her. Her opinionated (the less charitable among us might say
bossy) housekeeper Grace, her self-sufficient niece Cat, and Cat's
ex-boyfriend Jamie will hopefully all return in subsequent books.
Smith does a wonderful job of imparting a sense of place along with
the characters. Edinburgh, with all its quirks and charms, shines
brightly throughout the novel. Fans of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective
series should easily be able to take these Scottish characters into
their hearts as easily as they did the ones in Botswana.