Tea time for the traditionally built

Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* In stressful times, Botswana detective Precious Ramotswe always finds solace in a steaming pot of red bush tea. But it's going to take many cups of the richly hued liquid to help her cope with current woes. Topping the list is the state of Mma's tiny white van, which has developed an ominous rattle she can no longer ignore. Meanwhile, at the detective agency, Mma Ramotswe and her very opinionated assistant, Grace Makutsi, are enlisted by football coach Leungo Molofololo to determine why his once-successful team has lost so many games. (Could there be a traitor among the ranks?) The case will certainly be a challenge. Mma Ramotswe knows nothing about football, and Mma Makutsi is distracted. Her fiancé, Phuti Radiphuti, has hired Violet Sephotho, Grace's one-time nemesis at the Botswana Secretarial College, to work at his furniture store. (Grace fears that glamorous, manipulative Violet is out to steal her man.) Grace trusts Phuti, but she knows men are weak. They cannot help it, she muses, they are dazzled, just as a mouse is hypnotized by the swaying of a cobra. And then the cobra strikes and it is all over for the mouse, just as it is for the man. Scotsman McCall Smith's rich regard for Botswana resonates in this warm, witty, and wise tenth installment in the internationally best-selling series. What fan can resist?--Block, Allison Copyright 2009 Booklist

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

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Once again, Precious Ramotswe uses her insights into human nature to unravel problems big and small in Smith's charming 10th novel to feature Botswana's No. 1 lady detective (after The Miracle at Speedy Motors). Leungo Molofololo, the owner of the Kalahari Swoopers, a local soccer team with a lot of athletic talent, suspects a traitor on the squad is deliberately sabotaging games for an unknown reason. Despite her complete ignorance of the sport, Mma Ramotswe agrees to look into the matter. She and her prickly assistant, Grace Makutsi, attend a match and begin interviewing the players in an effort to solve what amounts to the book's main mystery. The soccer inquiry, though, is secondary to a major event in Mma Ramotswe's life-the impending demise of the little white van she's used for many years that's much more than a machine to her. Fans can look forward to the debut of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency on HBO on March 29. (Apr.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

Mma Precious Ramotswe wrestles with a timeless problemto cling to the old or embrace the newin her tenth adventure. Mr. Leungo Molofololo, the latest client of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, has a big problem. The soccer team he owns, the Kalahari Swoopers, has stopped winning. Someone on the team, he tells Mma Ramotswe, is throwing the matches, and he wants her to find out who. Despite her complete ignorance of the game and her client's failure to pay a retainer, Botswana's preeminent detective conscientiously begins interviewing Swoopers to find out who is the rotten link. As usual in this much-honored series (The Miracle at Speedy Motors, 2008, etc.), however, the real action lies elsewhere. Sharp-tongued assistant detective Grace Makutsi's engagement is imperiled when her fianc, Mr. Phuti Radiphuti, hires her old nemesis, mantrap Violet Sephotho, to sell beds at his furniture store. Struggling to keep her man, Mma Makutsi has to decide between buying food and indulging in a pair of faux-alligator shoes. Mma Ramotswe's beloved little white van seems to be "sick at heart." Should she report its condition to her husband, auto salesman Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, who'll surely want to replace it, or try to get one of his apprentices to fix it behind his back? Episodes in Smith's series, like those in a long-running sitcom, have stopped competing with each other as better or worse and instead have gelled into a self-contained world into which audiences enter with pleasure and gratitude. Here's more of the same. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Chapter One Mr. Molofololo Traditionally built people may not look as if they are great walkers, but there was a time when Precious Ramotswe walked four miles a day. As a girl in Mochudi, all those years ago, a pupil at the school that looked down over the sprawling village below, she went to her lessons every morning on foot, joining the trickle of children that made its way up the hill, the girls in blue tunics, the boys in khaki shirts and shorts, like little soldiers. The journey from the house where she lived with her father and the older cousin who looked after her took all of an hour, except, of course, when she was lucky and managed to ride on the mule-drawn water cart that occasionally passed that way. The driver of this cart, with whom her father had worked in the gold mines as a young man, knew who she was and always slowed down to allow her to clamber up on the driver's seat beside him. Other children would watch enviously and try to wave down the water cart. "I cannot carry all Botswana," said the driver. "If I gave all you children a ride on my cart, then my poor mules would die. Their hearts would burst. I cannot allow that." "But you have Precious up there!" called out the boys. "Why is she so special?" The driver looked at Precious and winked. "Tell them why you are special, Precious. Explain it to them." The young Mma Ramotswe, barely eight, was overwhelmed by embarrassment. "But I am not special. I am just a girl." "You are the daughter of Obed Ramotswe," said the driver. "He is a great man. That is why you are riding up here." He was right, of course--at least in what he said about Obed Ramotswe, who was, by any standards, a fine man. At that age, Precious had only a faint inkling of what her father stood for; later on, as a young woman, she would come to understand what it was to be the daughter of Obed Ramotswe. But in those days, on the way to school, whether riding in state on the water cart or walking along the side of that dusty road with her friends, she had school to think about, with its lessons on so many subjects--the history of Botswana, from the beginning, when it was known as Khama's country, across the plains of which great lions walked, to the emergence of the new Botswana, then still a chrysalis in a dangerous world; writing lessons, with the letters of the alphabet being described in white chalk on an ancient blackboard, all whirls and loops; arithmetic, with its puzzling multiplication tables that needed to be learned by heart--when there was so much else that the heart had to learn. The water cart, of course, did not pass very often, and so on most days there was a long trudge to school and a long walk back. Some children had an even greater journey; in one class there was a boy who walked seven miles there and seven miles back, even in the hottest of months, when the sun came down upon Botswana like a pounding fist, when the cattle huddled together under the umbrella shade of the acacia trees, not daring to wander off in search of what scraps of grass remained. This boy thought nothing of his daily journey; this is what you did if you wanted to go to school to learn the things that your parents had never had the chance to learn. And you did not complain, even if during the rainy season you might narrowly escape being struck by lightning or being washed away by the torrents that rose in the previously dry watercourses. You did not complain in that Botswana. Now, of course, it was different, and it was the contemplation of these differences that made Mma Ramotswe think about walking again. "We are becoming lazy, Mma Ramotswe," said Mma Makutsi one afternoon, as they sipped their afternoon cup of red bush tea in the offices of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency. “ Excerpted from Tea Time for the Traditionally Built 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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