Book review: The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith

Being so enamored of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, I turned to another series authored by Alexander McCall Smith for the twenty-fifth book I read in 2015.  The Sunday Philosophy Club introduces Isabel Dalhousie, the series-titular protagonist, a single, wealthy forty-something journal editor living in Edinburgh.  The book opens with Isabel witnessing the violent, perhaps-not-accidental demise of a young man by falling from the upper circle in a concert hall, a startling opening involving actual death that immediately informs you that this is not going to be in the same comfortable, Mitfordesque vein as his best-known series. Feeling that being the last one to see him alive in the split-second he passes the railing bestows on her a moral responsibility to inquire into the circumstances of his death, she begins to investigate.

It's a crime scene worthy of Lord Peter Wimsey, but Isabel Dalhousie, sadly, is no Harriet Vane. Rather than strong and decisive, she is apologetic and wishy-washy. She dithers and questions herself constantly, which McCall Smith seems to view as the proper attitude for philosophers, though those I've studied (e.g., Plato, Sartre, Kant) present themselves very confidently.  Worse, like Sidney Chambers, she stumbles onto the truth by mere coincidence, after her deductions have led her in the wrong direction entirely.  It's difficult to respect her as the heroine of a mystery series, when she's not presented as being all that clever.

Oh, and the Sunday Philosophy Club of the title never even convenes, let alone has anything to do with the plot of the book.  Precious Ramotswe has nothing to worry about in relation to her sibling-creation, Isabel Dalhousie.