The Sunday Philosophy Club : An Isabel Dalhousie Mystery

Rating:
Summary: Boring
Review: I am listening to this book and for the first time in a long time, I'm fast forwarding just to get it over with. I wanted to like it so much.......I LOVE the other series. But this one just doesn't measure up and although I will suffer through til the end just to see what happens, I doube if I'll pick up the next one. What a disappointment!

Rating:
Summary: Well written but character and story a bore.
Review: I know this is not the continuation of the Botswana series, but still... and I LOVE Edinburgh, Scotland, but that still wasn't enough to redeem this bore. Parts read like a philosophy doctoral theses, cramming in as many citations and name-dropping Philosophers like mad. And the final blow after I made it all the way to the end? A total cop-out of an solution.

Rating:
Summary: Lacks Story-Telling Magic
Review: I was dismayed with this new series because first and foremost, it lacked the story-telling magic of the Botswana stories. It lacked that magic because the heroine here, Isabel Dalhousie, is a mouse compared to the lionness of Precious Ramotswe. Isabel is a mouse because she is mired in philosophical hair-splitting. She can't figure out that it is moral and good to warn her niece against marriage to a philanderer, and only does so against her rational judgment, in a moment of instinctual truth-telling. Mma Ramotswe is a lionness because she is imbued with moral purpose. She may be undecided at times how to solve an issue, but she has no doubt where right and wrong lie, and who is right and who is wrong. Isabel may be editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, but she flounders in a sea of obfuscatory rhetoric. Mma Ramotswe cuts right to the chase. She lives ethics, she takes in and nurtures orphans, she is interested in her neighbors and her community, she has a kind word and a greeting for all who cross her path. Hers are the ethics that are truly applied. Isabel by contrast leads a cold, self-centered life. Aside from intellectual pursuits, her only personal interest in life is her niece, an adult young woman who is quite self sufficient and needs only a nudge in the direction of the right man. While Isabel spends long paragraphs ruminating over the finer points of Kantian philosophy, her personal life is unpeopled, with only a few, carefully edited companions allowed entrance. Her encounters are coincidence which serve to move the mystery, such as it is, forward, though at a sodden pace. The author strews red herrings in the path of reader and detective, but when the guilty party is revealed, the moment is almost tossed away. The result is a novel that feels both too long and too quickly wrapped up.

Perhaps the malaise that seems to hang over this book lies in its setting, a stodgy Edinburgh (I hope we all know it's pronounced Ehdinburrah), which seems gray and dull compared to Gaborone, depicted as a veritable African paradise (though with a few serpents swiftly dispatched by Mma Ramotswe's clever strategems and homespun wisdom). By contrast, the chicanery in Edinburgh is of a different nature, financially sophisticated, untraceable, unprovable. Perhaps the author's feelings about Scotland compared to Botswana, the emotional sunlight that permeates the latter and the intellectual chill the former, has influenced the tone and tenor of this most unsatisfying novel.

Rating:
Summary: Believe the Negative Reviews-This One Just Doesn't Work!
Review: In his Mma Ramotswe books, Alexander McCall Smith draws wonderful, vivid, pictures of the land and people of Botswana. Now he has decided to set a book in his home, Edinburgh, Scotland. So how is it, that this work falls totally flat?

Nothing here works, including the title. The protagonist may be a member of the Sunday Philosophy Club, but that really has nothing to do with the book, except perhaps to give it a title reminiscent of the Ramotswe books.

His protagonist, Isabel Dalhousie muses endlessly about human philosophy, but most of it seems to be in the abstract. There's little to care about here. Mma Ramotswe's thoughts about life and human behavior are more down to earth and her humanity connects her with the reader.

As for the mystery, it's minimal and the solution seems tacked on.

The whole thing seems to be a way for Smith to talk about his own hobby, the Really Terrible Orchestra, and perhaps served as a filler while he took a break from the Botswana series. But the whole thing has little heart, and I am glad to see he will be publishing another Mma Ramotswe book this spring. I will be delighted to read it and revisit characters I truly can care about.



Rating:
Summary: Murder and everyday philosophy open new series
Review: On the first page of this new series opener Isabel Dalhousie witnesses a young man fall to his death from the upper seats of an Edinburgh concert hall. Cultured, attractive, early 40s, and comfortably well off, Isabel has a nice life. True, she worries about her niece's cad of a boyfriend, but since she still carries a torch for a handsome cad of her own, she understands the chemistry. But, having met the eye of the dead boy as he fell, Isabel feels a certain responsibility to understand his death, be it accident, murder or suicide.


The Sunday Philosophy Club never actually meets during the course of the book, but Isabel, editor of "The Review of Applied Ethics," has a whimsically philosophical turn of mind, which she applies neatly to everyday life as well as questions of curiosity, obligation, and murder.

As with Smith's popular series, "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency," the mystery provides a focal point for the narrative, but is secondary to the interplay of character, dialogue, and motivation. Secondary characters, from the niece's spurned ex-boyfriend, a too-nice guy who's a favorite of Isabel's, to Grace, Isabel's blunt and earthy housekeeper, are well-drawn. The philosophical/ethical bent, while not in the least taxing, is humorous and stimulating, and Isabel is a thoroughly delightful, self-possessed, and charmingly flawed heroine.

Rating:
Summary: i loved it.
Review: smart.
provocative.
charming.
funny.
whimiscal.
musing.
mystery.
murder?
love it.

Rating:
Summary: Listen to This!
Review: This book was terrific on tape; one of the few that I have enjoyed more than just reading the book. I plan to keep this instead of turning it over to my used book store. Very entertaining!

Rating:
Summary: A real disappointment
Review: What a letdown! I kept reading this book hoping it would get better, but it never did. There is a real lack of charm in both characters and place, and a real overburdening of the reader with uninteresting philosophical musings. The Mma Ramotswe series is so much better.

Rating:
Summary: Falls way short of No. 1 series
Review: When she sees a young man plunge to his death after an orchastra concert, Isabel Dalhousie wonders whether she should get involved. It just seems so unlikely that the fall was an accident, and as editor of an Applied Ethics journal, doesn't Isabel have a philosophical duty to investigate when she knows something--and feels a connection? Of course, she can only investigate when she isn't busy trying to prevent her favorite niece from making a terrible mistake and marrying the wrong guy. Gradually, Isabel becomes more and more obsessed with these two challenges, finding more and more reasons why someone might have wanted to push poor Mark to his death.

Author Alexander McCall Smith gained huge popularity with his No. 1 Ladies' Detective series. The Isabel Dalhousie series, of which this is the first, is set in Scotland rather than Africa, but includes investigation of tribal customs almost as strange as those of Africa. Unfortunately, I simply did not find either the characters or the mystery to be compelling.

Isabel Dalhousie, unlike Mme Ramotswe, does not have to work and has her entire day free to manage other people's business and feel smug and superior to mere working people. Her efforts into 'applied ethics' might be important but certainly seem trivial from the small amount of information Smith chooses to share. Her favorite niece is somewhat less annoying than Isabel but serves mainly as a foil to Isabel's intelligence and perceptiveness.

Sleuths, whether amateur, police, or private, do have a tendency to make false accusations. Still, I would have thought that a practitioner of 'applied ethics' would have just a bit more of a sense of guilt over implying that innocent people committed murder. It didn't help that Isabel's involvement was largely unmotivated, lacking either a ticking clock or any sense of personal disaster that might occur if the true criminal were not tracked down.

From a mystery perspective, THE SUNDAY PHILOSOPHY CLUB has a huge hole in it--Isabel would never have gotten anywhere in her case without receiving one important clue--a clue that was simply unmotivated and made no sense from the mystery perspective.

I'm a fan of Smith's fairy-tale like No. 1 Ladies Detective series, but Isabel Dalhousie is about as much fun as reading a journal of applied ethics.

Rating:
Summary: A bizz is a feeling of antipathy
Review: While attending a concert of an Iceland symphonic group, Isabel Dalhousie sees a young man fall to his death. It seems to be an accident. Trying to soothe herself, she visits her niece the following day and they arrange to have dinner. In the midst of preparing dinner for her niece, Cat, and Cat's friend Toby, Isabel is pestered by a journalist investigating the young man's death. She finds out that Cat has encountered the young man.

Isabel's father, a lawyer, had studied at Harvard and had married someone from Boston. Pursuant to family pressure, he had returned to Edinburgh and had come to consider that his career was in the nature of serving a sentence. Her father's comment had been the basis for Isabel's decision to study philosophy at Cambridge. Isabel Dalhouse worked parttime. She was the editor of a journal called THE REVIEW OF APPLIED ETHICS. Isabel had never married. For her niece Cat she wanted her to find happiness. When Isabel went to Cornell on a fellowship her friend John Liamor took off for California with another woman. He claimed that America freed him.

At a gallery affair Isabel meets the supervisor of the young who died, The name of the supervisor is Paul Hogg. The young man, Mark Fraser, believed that something was going on at his firm, something in the nature of insider trading. Meeting Paul Hogg's fiancee, Isabel comes to feel that she is sociopathic and the person who engaged in insider trading. It is hard to do anything in Edinburgh without it getting known. The fiancee learns that Isabel has been making inquiries.

Eventually Isabel finds the solution to this excellent mystery. The story is clearly narrated and satisfying.