The Sunday Philosophy Club by Alexander McCall Smith, of No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency fame, has started another series around Isabel Dalhousie in Edinborough. Isabel is a the editor of the “Review of Applied Ethics” and organizer of a Sunday philosophy club (which never meets). She sees a young handsome man fall to his death and pursues the truth through meditations on Kant and everyday ethics. At the end it is Hume and his call for sympathy which McCall Smith seems to feel is the better ethics. The novel is a deliberately philosophical novel where meditations on ethical issues are interwoven with unfolding detective work. While it is one of the better philosophical novels I have read, there are moments when it lectures too much. Give McCall Smith a few more installments and he should find his stride and not feel he has to cover everything in each new novel.
What I still ask myself is why the Sunday philosophy club, after which the novel is names, never meets in the story? Will it meet in a future story? Will Isabel continue to never have the will gather the club? It strikes me that there is a hint in the missing club that gives a title to the book, but I can’t quite fix that hint.