Sonderbooks Book Review of The Sunday Philosophy Club

Reviewed November 18, 2004.
Pantheon Books, New York, 2004. 247 pages.
Available at Sembach Library (F MCC).
Sonderbooks Stand-out 2004, #2, Mystery and Adventure

Hooray! A new series by Alexander McCall Smith, the author of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency.

The Sunday Philosophy Club is more of a traditional mystery story than the other series. This one is set in Edinburgh. It begins as Isabel Dalhousie sees a young man fall from the upper level balcony of a concert hall.

The look on his face is hard to forget. Isabel’s curiosity gets the better of her and she tries to find out more about that young man. When she finds out that he enjoyed rock-climbing, she thinks it unlikely that he clumsily slipped and fell.

This is a fun story, some nice light reading. Isabel Dalhousie is another delightful character, but she isn’t just a remake of Precious Ramotswe. The speech patterns are different from that given to people in Botswana. Isabel is the part-time editor of a journal of philosophy, so the dilemmas she faces in the course of her investigation bring up philosophical questions which she ponders with the reader.

This is a great book for fans of a nice “cozy” clean mystery with characters who are good company.

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