#THE LADIES NUMBER ONE DETECTIVE AGENCY HOW TO#

And by the time you've made your way through the second, ''Tears of the Giraffe,'' and landed in the third, ''Morality for Beautiful Girls,'' you've realized that all this activity is much less about whodunit than why. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency,'' but hardly any suspense.

There's a good deal of bustle in the series' first volume, ''The No. What else would you expect from a lady who can kill a crocodile with one perfectly placed shot in the pitch dark (and then slit its stomach to retrieve a crucial piece of evidence), but goes all wobbly when she hears someone lurking outside her house in the middle of the night? But Mma Ramotswe's methods - and her results - are as unusual as the novels they inhabit. Of course, problems often lead to crimes. From the opening line in Smith's series of novels about Mma Ramotswe (the polite Setswana form of address by which she is known, even to her most intimate friends), it's clear that he's familiar enough with southern Africa to put a playful spin on most Western readers' assumptions. But it's quickly apparent that these two have more in common than energy and eccentricity.

#THE LADIES NUMBER ONE DETECTIVE AGENCY HOW TO#

His latest literary creation is a short, hefty (or, as she prefers, ''traditionally built'') middle-aged African woman with the deceptively delicate name of Precious Ramotswe, who has traveled a bit in her native Botswana but has never been as far as Johannesburg - and certainly not as far as ''London or wherever detectives went to find out how to be private detectives'' before setting up in business as her country's first and only female sleuth. Alexander McCall Smith is an elderly professor of medical law at Edinburgh University, a prolific author of reference and childrens' books and the founder (and resident bassoonist) of an ensemble called the Really Terrible Orchestra. Paper, $12.95.ĪT first, they might seem the unlikeliest of couples.

The ladies number one detective agency