With a tone that is as elegant and polite as that which is unfailingly used by his protagonist, McCall Smith gently unfolds a picture of life in Botswana’s capital... With a mastery of comic understatement and a powerfully evident sympathy for his subjects and their milieu, Alexander McCall Smith sets out a world where the old rituals of politeness and respect hold sway. His unassuming, carefully voiced tour of the small things that make life worth loving is a quiet delight’ The Times

In this fourth volume of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, the ever-popular Precious Ramotswe - Botswana’s leading, and only, female private detective - faces a new and unwanted problem: competition.

Ex-CID. Ex-New York. Ex-cellent’ reads the sign outside the Satisfaction Guaranteed Detective Agency.Cephas Buthelezi certainly talks the talk, Precious discovers, but would he have the wherewithal to deal with her current case - a man who has been attacked by ostrich rustlers, and is eager to reassess his life?

There is something almost divinely appealing about the way Alexander McCall Smith writes about daily life in Botswana . . . it is hard to think of a contemporary writer more genuinely engaging . . . [his] novels are also extremely funny: I find it impossible to think about them without smiling