Not quite Miss Marple

[threemonkeys]

A while back I said that I was giving up Alexander McCall Smith's No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency series. The writing of the stories and characters had fallen into a rut and the odour of post colonial condescension just wouldn't go away. However because I had found the first ones so engaging, I thought I would try out the other series by this author. I figured that since The Sunday Philosophy Club had new characters it might be fresher. As well, the book is set in Scotland and so the post colonial thing should not be an issue. Well the new characters were not engaging for me and I also learned that I had been wrong about post colonial attitudes towards Botswana. The condescension I has detected had been the ordinary garden variety and The Sunday Philosophy Club has it by the bucketful. So much so that I just could not gather any empathy for the main character at all. No empathy = no engagement = no enjoyment = no more reading this author.