The Double Comfort Safari Club,By Alexander McCall Smith, Little, Brown, £16.99
This is the latest instalment in the No 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, which follows the two-woman operation of gently indomitable proportions run by Precious Ramotswe in Gaborone, Botswana.
The pair have to contend with several cases, and Ramotswe’s assistant, Grace Makutsi, has her own troubles: her fiance is badly injured in an accident and a jealous aunt takes advantage of the situation to sequester him in her house and upset their marriage plans.
Fans of McCall Smith will no doubt be delighted with this latest addition to the series. The characters are here in all their matriarchal glory, negotiating their way through gentle obstacles while dispensing little pieces of homely wisdom and slurping huge amounts of tea.
The plot meanders along, and there is little in the way of surprise or sudden twists, which is very much in keeping with the style of the series.
McCall Smith’s books are enormously popular, and there’s nothing challenging here. The language and imagery are clear but also unoriginal. “Crystal clear water,” he writes, “glistened in the sun like a layer of liquid diamonds.” Neat enough, but it feels overly familiar, and given that his source material is the extraordinary environs of Botswana, a place of vibrant colours, culture and wildlife, readers could expect more in the way of detail.
McCall Smith’s Botswana feels like an idealised image of a sub-Saharan African country rather than a real location.
At the end of the 220 large-type pages you might wonder if anything has happened in this languorous version of Botswana.