Alexander McCall Smith: A Crime Reader's Guide to the Classics | CrimeReads

If you've read even one of the twenty-one books published between 1998 and 2020 that chronicle the professional and domestic adventures of the agency, plus its friends, associates, and families, then you know what he's talking about.

The core of the books lie not in the cases they solve, but in the way they go about it; the interactions both with the people and the land; the wry observations and commentaries; and the deep, sometimes dark, human truths that are revealed along the way. These aren't major crimes, usually, at least not in the way we're accustomed to thinking about them. No one gets murdered. "We aren't here to solve crimes," Mma Ramotswe says in Morality for Beautiful Girls (2001). "We help people with the problems in their lives."