the sunday philosophy club series in order

It’s a shame that I didn’t take to Isabel given that the book is really about her and her thoughts on modern day society. As it is, I’m not sure that there’s enough left to discover about Isabel that would keep me reading. Given that this is to be a series (and in fact the sequel Friends, Lovers, Chocolate is already available), I think that some of the backstory could have been alluded to so as to give the reader the idea that there’s more to come before being drawn out in later novels. I don’t doubt that there are women like this in real life, but it is an awful lot to take in in what’s actually quite a short book (coming in at just under 300 pages) and I did think that McCall Smith leveraged in the backstory with her lover John Liamor a little too obviously. She’s an independently wealthy, middle-aged woman (who married the love of her life, only to be left by him) who has retained her looks but who isn’t pursuing a relationship and who also happens to be a philosopher.

In part, this is because I found that she rather stretched belief. I’m going to confess right from the start that I did not take to Isabel as a character. The Sunday Philosophy Club is the beginning of a new series featuring the middle-aged and single Isabel Dalhousie. He was pushed …Īlexander McCall Smith is not a writer whose work I have previously read (although I have heard of his very successful novel The No. And instinct tells her the man who tumbled to his death in front of her eyes after a concert in the Usher Hall didn’t fall. Which is probably why, by instinct, she is an amateur sleuth. An accomplished philosopher and editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, she knows all about the difference between good and bad.

Behind Edinburgh’s regimented Georgian facades, its moral compasses are spinning with greed, dishonesty, lust and murderous intent.

The sunday philosophy club series in order