The Sunday Philosophy Club -- Alexander McCall Smith

I've given in to peer pressure. Everybody else reads them, so I decided to finally try an Alexander McCall Smith book.

Granted it wasn't one of the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency books. I read the new one, The Sunday Philosophy Club, which is also the beginning of a new series about a woman named Isabel Dalhousie.

It took me a while to get into—I'm not really used to mysteries (with a few exceptions, of course) in which the main character/detective is soooo emotionally connected to the crime. Not in a 'someone killed my wife/husband/kid/second cousin' kind of way, or in any of the other normal ways that mystery authors connect their characters to the crime. No, Isabel goes to the opera and sees a young man fall from the top balcony. And they make eye contact as he falls, and she knows that he was pushed. It wasn't the connection itself that bothered me—the set-up was fine—my problem was that she spent so much time being depressed and philosophizing about this poor, squished boy that it took quite some time for things to get going.

At first, Isabel really irritated me—again, the constant philosophizing. (Yes, I realize that the title maybe should have tipped me off). But she grew on me. Pretty early on, actually, when I realized that despite all of her pondering about morality, etc., she could be plenty nasty (granted, only in her head, but somehow that's even funnier) when confronted with someone she didn't like:

"Max and Morris," said Isabel. "Two German boys. The very first comic-book characters. They got up to all sorts of mischief and were eventually chopped into pieces by a baker and made into biscuits."

She looked at Toby. Max and Morris had fallen into the baker's flour vat and had been put into a mixing machine. The biscuits into which they had been made were eventually eaten by ducks. Such a Germanic idea, she thought; and for a moment she imagined that this might happen to Toby, tumbling into such a machine and being made into biscuit.

"You're smiling," said Cat.

"Not intentionally," said Isabel hurriedly. Did one ever mean to smile?

Eventually, though, things do get going. Stuff happens, Isabel investigates. I liked the characters, and I'll definitely read the next book in the series, when it comes out. Really, all the book suffered from was the 'pilot episode' problem—too much time introducing the characters and their motivations and problems and beliefs and interests and blah blah blah, and not enough actual story. At the beginning, anyway. By the end, I really did like it. Really.