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Loading... The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agencyby Alexander McCall Smith
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Although written tell-don’t show and lacked emotion, it was a delightful tale and kept my interest. (  )JoAnnSmithAinsworth | Jul 9, 2009 |   Well, my mum and the anonymous commenter on a recent post (on livejournal, where many of these reviews originally appeared) were both right to recommend this. I found it a little slow to start but utterly utterly charming. Lovely characters, a nice meandering sort of plot, with lots of little mysteries solved and one bigger one running through the rest of the book. And some looking back at the past, childhood and young adulthood and the life of her father. Two generations of Africans living in Botswana, and loving their country. It's a beautiful portrait of a country, as well as of the people living there and their friends. I shall look forward to reading the sequels at some point. (  )lnr_blair | Jul 7, 2009 | This mystery series is set in Botswana, where the heroine Precious Ramotswe sets up the first (and only) detective agency in Gabarone. A bit like an African Ms. Marple, in the first installment Mma Ramotswe goes about solving cases including a missing husband, a con man, following a wayward daughter, and tracking a missing boy. It's a light and quick read, the mysteries are fairly easily solved, and the sleuthing is often straightforward, though its clear Mma Ramotswe is a novice and her clients sometimes don't pay and her subjects sometimes outwit her. Detective issues aside its a neat look at Botswana and Gabarone. I found that while enjoyable, this was one of the rare times I can say I enjoyed the TV version better, even though I've only seen the first episode, which corresponds very well to the first book. The HBO miniseries did a better job at fleshing out the characters, particularly the secretary and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni, and of interweaving the cases as they arose as opposed to spending a brief chapter on each one. While this was fun, I'm not sure that I'm compelled to read the rest. I will probably put the rest of the HBO miniseries on my queue to see though. ( )bfertig | Jul 3, 2009 | so glad i stuck with this, first time reading i was going to stop because felt like not my cup of tea but now hooked and makes me want to try bush tea (  )purplesue | May 27, 2009 | I don't get why people raved over this. (  )picardyrose | May 27, 2009 | 0.021 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 034911675X, Paperback)Penzler Pick, July 2001: Working in a mystery tradition that will cause genre aficionados to think of such classic sleuths as Melville Davisson Post's Uncle Abner or Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee, Alexander McCall Smith creates an African detective, Precious Ramotswe, who's their full-fledged heir.It's the detective as folk hero, solving crimes through an innate, self-possessed wisdom that, combined with an understanding of human nature, invariably penetrates into the heart of a puzzle. If Miss Marple were fat and jolly and lived in Botswana--and decided to go against any conventional notion of what an unmarried woman should do, spending the money she got from selling her late father's cattle to set up a Ladies' Detective Agency--then you have an idea of how Precious sets herself up as her country's first female detective. Once the clients start showing up on her doorstep, Precious enjoys a pleasingly successful series of cases. But the edge of the Kalahari is not St. Mary Mead, and the sign Precious orders, painted in brilliant colors, is anything but discreet. Pointing in the direction of the small building she had purchased to house her new business, it reads "THE NO. 1 LADIES DETECTIVE AGENCY. FOR ALL CONFIDENTIAL MATTERS AND ENQUIRIES. SATISFACTION GUARANTEED FOR ALL PARTIES. UNDER PERSONAL MANAGEMENT." The solutions she comes up with, whether in the case of the clinic doctor with two quite different personalities (depending on the day of the week), or the man who had joined a Christian sect and seemingly vanished, or the kidnapped boy whose bones may or may not be those in a witch doctor's magic kit, are all sensible, logical, and satisfying. Smith's gently ironic tone is full of good humor towards his lively, intelligent heroine and towards her fellow Africans, who live their lives with dignity and with cautious acceptance of the confusions to which the world submits them. Precious Ramotswe is a remarkable creation, and The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency well deserves the praise it received from London's Times Literary Supplement. I look forward with great eagerness to the upcoming books featuring the memorable Miss Ramotswe, Tears of the Giraffe and Morality for Beautiful Girls, soon to be available in the U.S. --Otto Penzler (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:10 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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