2008-06-11 Rather boring...

This was the first book I had read by Alexander McCall Smith and it hasn't made me want to read another! After finishing the 281 pages of this book I felt that it could have almost been condensed into a short story. Isobel Dalhousie is the main character of the novel. She is a middle aged woman, a philosopher who plays amateur detective after seeing a young man plunge to his death at a concert they had both attended. The story laboured through Isobel's suspicions of whether the death may have been accidental or was the young man pushed. That is the story in a nutshell and I found the book to be quite pretentious, long & drawn-out and although I did manage to finish it, I wouldn't want to read another book by this author.