Book: The Sunday Philosophy Club

[Erudite]

Title: The Sunday Philosophy Club
Author: Alexander McCall Smith
Genre: Mystery
Pages: 247

This book is nice. Not super duper exciting, nor enlightening, but nice. Not a thriller, not action-packed....nice. I hope you can tell from that that I had a pretty luke-warm response to the book. It is an Isabel Dalhousie mystery, which is the main character, and is apparently a series. It is set in Edinburgh, Scotland. Isabel witnesses the death of a young man in the first chapter and then the rest of the book is how she goes about finding out why the death occurred. Woven in is her relationship with her niece and that niece's poor choice in men. Oh, and there's a salty housekeeper, but that's practically a cliche, isn't it?

What makes me even recommend anyone reading the book is the way Isabel's character is created. She is the editor of a philosophy magazine, so there lots of interesting internal discussions with herself considering different philosophical points of view: Kant or Wittengenstein and a couple of others. She is constantly considering writing a new article about some of the philosophical thoughts of her own life based on her experiences. That is about all that makes it an interesting read.

As with most mysteries, there's no real way to discover who the bad guy was until the end, because Isabel is wrong at least twice and the author spent time sending you down the wrong road in finding it out. I don't read mysteries as a general rule, because I don't like that aspect of it. I don't like "surprise" endings that aren't logically connected to the story that has been told. And that is the case with this one. The surprise ending isn't connected to the story that came before it and deals with a character you've met just once in the story before.

But the story is fairly interesting from Isabel's point of view. So I can recommend it if you want some NICE light reading.