The Sunday Philosophy Club

Isabel Dalhousie, editor of the Review of Applied Ethics and inveterate moral philosopher of Edinburgh, watches a young man fall to his death from the upper circle of a concert hall and cannot stop wondering whether it was an accident. Her housekeeper Grace advises her to mind her own business. Her niece Cat advises her to mind her own business. Isabel, characteristically, finds the philosophical stakes of remaining silent too high to accept. Alexander McCall Smith's first Isabel Dalhousie novel establishes the series' particular atmosphere: Edinburgh's social world, filtered through a mind that cannot stop applying moral scrutiny to everything it encounters.

Davina Porter's narration is so precisely right for this character and this world that it is difficult to imagine the series without her. Her voice carries both Isabel's intellectual warmth and the gentle comedy of a woman who is always slightly more involved than she intended to be. At just under eight hours, The Sunday Philosophy Club is a charming introduction to one of contemporary fiction's most thoughtful amateur sleuths.