The comforts of a muddy Saturday

Review by Booklist Review

This fifth installment in McCall Smith's engaging series finds fortysomething Edinburgh moral philosopher Isabel Dalhousie investigating a doctor accused of scientific fraud. Did Marcus Moncrieff manipulate the data for a drug developed by the same company that funded his research? Isabel soon discovers that numbers are but part of the equation. It turns out that Dr. Moncrieff's nephew, who is also his assistant, might have had good reason to exact revenge on his uncle. (At issue is the inheritance of a large farm on Scotland's Black Isle.) Meanwhile, Isabel's much younger boyfriend, Jamie, continues to dote on Isabel and their infant son, Charlie. (Alas, Jamie's extraordinary good looks have Isabel forever worrying that he will lose interest in her.) There are other moral dilemmas, too. Isabel suspects that Eddie, the vulnerable young man who works at Isabel's niece's deli, lied about the reason he needs to borrow money. And Grace, Isabel's very assertive housekeeper, has been telling local residents that adorable Charlie is her own. McCall Smith, who also pens the best-selling No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and 44 Scotland Street novels, has rendered a wise and very human heroine who grows more endearing with each entry.--Block, Allison Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In narrating the fifth installment of this series, Davina Porter has so become the voice of the charmingly ethical Isabel Dalhousie that it is hard to imagine anyone else ever taking her place. The new novel gives Porter an opportunity to fill out Isabel's character; despite her best intentions, Isabel's voice occasionally rises with indignation or jealousy that is at odds with her belief system. A slightly venomous tone seeps into Isabel's voice as she contemplates an opportunity to humiliate her nemesis, Professor Dove. Toward the end of the novel, Porter performs a small tour de force in a ricocheting argument between Isabel and her niece. The two ping-pong their views without the slightest hesitation or slip on Porter's part. Porter's skillful performance will make listeners eager for the next installment. A Pantheon hardcover (Reviews, July 28). (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

Isabel Dalhousie steps in to help a doctor accused of scientific fraud regarding a new drug. With an eight-city tour. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Even more than her first four adventures, Isabel Dalhousie's fifth is a record of complications that constantly challenge her ethical faculties while charmingly failing to disturb her tranquility. What happens when Professor Christopher Dove, who schemed unsuccessfully in The Careful Use of Compliments (2007) to replace Isabel as editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, sends her an article on the venerable Trolley Problem? After due thought, Isabel sends it out to two readers, just as she would a contribution by anyone else. What happens when her niece Cat takes a holiday in Sri Lanka with her current lover? Isabel manages Cat's delicatessen in her absence, of course. When Cat's assistant Eddie, a damaged boy, asks Isabel for money, she agrees to give it, come what may in the way of second thoughts. And when she suspects that American composer Nick Smart is interested in more than musical collaboration with Jamie, Cat's ex-lover and the father of Isabel's son Charlie, she cycles through one emotional reaction after another before the unsurprising resolution. In the thread most closely approximating an orthodox mystery, Stella Moncrieff pleads with Isabel to exonerate her husband, a physician in disgrace for allegedly altering information on the clinical trials of a new anti-MRSA drug and causing a man's death. Isabel is so perturbed that she wonders at one point if she's actually being threatened. Yet all ends quietly. Another insubstantial yet deeply rooted paean to Isabel's status as an "intermeddler" whose reasoning begins where other literary sleuths' ends. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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What made Isabel Dalhousie think about chance? It was one of those curious coincidences--an inconsequential one--as when we turn the corner and find ourselves face-to-face with the person we've just been thinking about. Or when we answer the telephone and hear at the other end the voice of the friend we had been about to call. These things make us believe either in telepathy--for which there is as little hard evidence as there is, alas, for the existence of Santa Claus--or in pure chance, which we flatter ourselves into thinking plays a small role in our lives. Yet chance, Isabel thought, determines much of what happens to us, from the original birth lottery onwards. We like to think that we plan what happens to us, but it is chance, surely, that lies behind so many of the great events of our lives--the meeting with the person with whom we are destined to spend the rest of our days, the receiving of a piece of advice which influences our choice of career, the spotting of a particular house for sale; all of these may be down to pure chance, and yet they govern how our lives work out and how happy--or unhappy--we are going to be. It happened when she was walking with Jamie across the Meadows, the large, tree-lined park that divides South Edinburgh from the Old Town. Jamie was her . . . What was he? Her lover--her younger lover--her boyfriend; the father of her child. She was reluctant to use the word partner because it has associations of impermanence and business arrangements. Jamie was most definitely not a business arrangement; he was her north, her south, to quote Auden, whom she had recently decided she would quote less frequently. But even in the making of that resolution, she had found a line from Auden that seemed to express it all, and had given up on that ambition. And why, she asked herself, should one not quote those who saw the world more clearly than one did oneself? Her north, her south; well, now they were walking north, on one of those prolonged Scottish summer evenings when it never really gets dark, and when one might forget just how far from south one really is. The fine weather had brought people out onto the grass; a group of young men, bare-chested in the unaccustomed warmth, were playing a game of football, discarded tee-shirts serving as the goal markers; a man was throwing a stick for a tireless border collie to fetch; a young couple lay stretched out, the girl's head resting on the stomach of a bearded youth who was looking away, at something in the sky that only he could see. The air was heavy, and although it would soon be eight o'clock, there was still a good deal of sunlight about--soft, slanting sunlight, with the quality that goes with light that has been about for the whole day and is now comfortable, used. The coincidence was that Jamie should suddenly broach the subject of what it must be like to feel thoroughly ashamed of oneself. Later on she asked herself why he had suddenly decided to talk about that. Had he seen something on the Meadows to trigger such a line of thought? Strange things were no doubt done in parks by shameless people, but hardly in the early evening, in full view of passersby, on an evening such as this. Had he seen some shameless piece of exhibitionism? She had read recently of a Catholic priest who went jogging in the nude, and explained that he did so on the grounds that he sweated profusely when he took exercise. Indeed, for such a person it might be more convenient not to be clad, but this was not Sparta, where athletes disported naked in the palaestra; this was Scotland, where it was simply too cold to do as in Sparta, no matter how classically minded one might be. Whatever it was that prompted Jamie, he suddenly remarked: "What would it be like not to be able to go out in case people recognised you? What if you had done something so . . . so appalling that Excerpted from The Comforts of a Muddy Saturday by Alexander McCall Smith All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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