{"product_id":"isabel-dalhousie-seriesisbn-9781400077106","title":"Isabel Dalhousie Series","description":"\u003cp\u003e\u003cb\u003eISABEL DALHOUSIE - Book 2\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cb\u003eNothing captures the charm of Edinburgh like the bestselling Isabel Dalhousie series of novels featuring the insatiably curious philosopher and woman detective.  Whether investigating a case or a problem of philosophy, the indefatigable Isabel Dalhousie, one of fiction’s most richly developed amateur detectives, is always ready to pursue the answers to all of life’s questions, large and small.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eIn this delightful second installment in Alexander McCall Smith’s bestselling detective  series, the irrepressibly curious Isabel Dalhousie gets caught up in a highly unusual  affair of the heart.\u003cp\u003eWhen Isabel is asked to cover for vacationing Cat at her delicatessen,  Isabel meets a man with a most interesting problem. He recently had a heart transplant  and is suddenly haunted by memories of events that never happened to him.The situation  piques her insatiable curiosity: Could the memories be connected with the donor’s  demise? Naturally, Isabel’s friend Jamie thinks it is none of Isabel’s business.  Meanwhile, Grace, Isabel’s housekeeper, has become infatuated with a man at her spiritualist  meeting, and Cat brings home an Italian lothario. That makes for some particularly  tricky problems–both practical and philosophical–for Isabel to unravel in this enormously  engaging and highly unusual mystery.\u003c\/p\u003e“A completely absorbing, profound, funny, sad, and moving book that will captivate [and] enthrall.”–\u003ci\u003eDetroit Free Press\u003c\/i\u003e“Witty, ruminative and wise.” –\u003ci\u003eThe Times-Picayune\u003c\/i\u003e “Enchanting. . . . Delicious mental comfort food. . . . The ‘intimate’ city of Edinburgh is an appealing character in its own right.”–\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e“Isabel Dalhousie . . . who made such a smart impression in . . . \u003ci\u003eThe Sunday Philosophy Club,\u003c\/i\u003e returns in \u003ci\u003eFriends, Lovers, Chocolate\u003c\/i\u003e to further advance the cause of brainy, inquisitive older women who just can’t resist an intellectual puzzle.”–\u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003eAlexander McCall Smith is the author of the international phenomenon The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series and of The Sunday Philosophy Club series. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and was a law professor at the University of Botswana and at Edinburgh University. He lives in Scotland. In his spare time he is a bassoonist in the RTO (Really Terrible Orchestra).Chapter one\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The man in the brown Harris tweed overcoat—double-breasted with three  small leather-covered buttons on the cuffs—made his way slowly along the  street that led down the spine of Edinburgh. He was aware of the seagulls  which had drifted in from the shore and which were swooping down onto the  cobblestones, picking up fragments dropped by somebody who had been  careless with a fish. Their mews were the loudest sound in the street at  that moment, as there was little traffic and the city was unusually quiet.  It was October, it was mid-morning, and there were few people about. A boy  on the other side of the road, scruffy and tousle-haired, was leading a  dog along with a makeshift leash—a length of string. The dog, a small  Scottish terrier, seemed unwilling to follow the boy and glanced for a  moment at the man as if imploring him to intervene to stop the tugging and  the pulling. There must be a saint for such dogs, thought the man; a saint  for such dogs in their small prisons.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    The man reached the St. Mary’s Street crossroads. On the corner on his  right was a pub, the World’s End, a place of resort for fiddlers and  singers; on his left, Jeffrey Street curved round and dipped under the  great arch of the North Bridge. Through the gap in the buildings, he could  see the flags on top of the Balmoral Hotel: the white-on-blue cross of the  Saltire, the Scottish flag, the familiar diagonal stripes of the Union  Jack. There was a stiff breeze from the north, from Fife, which made the  flags stand out from their poles with pride, like the flags on the prow of  a ship ploughing into the wind. And that, he thought, was what Scotland  was like: a small vessel pointed out to sea, a small vessel buffeted by  the wind.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He crossed the street and continued down the hill. He walked past a  fishmonger, with its gilt fish sign suspended over the street, and the  entrance to a close, one of those small stone passages that ran off the  street underneath the tenements. And then he was where he wanted to be,  outside the Canongate Kirk, the high-gabled church set just a few paces  off the High Street. At the top of the gable, stark against the light blue  of the sky, the arms of the kirk, a stag’s antlers, gilded, against the  background of a similarly golden cross.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He entered the gate and looked up. One might be in Holland, he thought,  with that gable; but there were too many reminders of Scotland—the wind,  the sky, the grey stone. And there was what he had come to see, the stone  which he visited every year on this day, this day when the poet had died  at the age of twenty-four. He walked across the grass towards the stone,  its shape reflecting the gable of the kirk, its lettering still clear  after two hundred years. Robert Burns himself had paid for this stone to  be erected, in homage to his brother in the muse, and had written the  lines of its inscription: This simple stone directs Pale Scotia’s way\/To  pour her sorrows o’er her poet’s dust.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He stood quite still. There were others who could be visited here. Adam  Smith, whose days had been filled with thoughts of markets and economics  and who had coined an entire science, had his stone here, more impressive  than this, more ornate; but this was the one that made one weep.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He reached into a pocket of his overcoat and took out a small black  notebook of the sort that used to advertise itself as waterproof. Opening  it, he read the lines that he had written out himself, copied from a  collection of Robert Garioch’s poems. He read aloud, but in a low voice,  although there was nobody present save for him and the dead:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Canongait kirkyaird in the failing year\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Is auld and grey, the wee roseirs are bare,\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Five gulls leem white agin the dirty air.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Why are they here? There’s naething for them here\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Why are we here oursels?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Yes, he thought. Why am I here myself? Because I admire this man, this  Robert Fergusson, who wrote such beautiful words in the few years given  him, and because at least somebody should remember and come here on this  day each year. And this, he told himself, was the last time that he would  be able to do this. This was his final visit. If their predictions were  correct, and unless something turned up, which he thought was unlikely,  this was the last of his pilgrimages.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He looked down at his notebook again. He continued to read out loud. The  chiselled Scots words were taken up by the wind and carried away:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Strang, present dool\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Ruggs at my hairt. Lichtlie this gin ye daur:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Here Robert Burns knelt and kissed the mool.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Strong, present sorrow\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Tugs at my heart. Treat this lightly if you dare:\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Here Robert Burns knelt and kissed the soil.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    He took a step back. There was nobody there to observe the tears which had  come to his eyes, but he wiped them away in embarrassment. Strang, present  dool. Yes. And then he nodded towards the stone and turned round, and that  was when the woman came running up the path. He saw her almost trip as the  heel of a shoe caught in a crack between two paving stones, and he cried  out. But she recovered herself and came on towards him, waving her hands.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Ian. Ian.” She was breathless. And he knew immediately what news she had  brought him, and he looked at her gravely. She said, “Yes.” And then she  smiled, and leant forward to embrace him.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “When?” he asked, stuffing the notebook back into his pocket.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Right away,” she said. “Now. Right now. They’ll take you down there  straightaway.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    They began to walk back along the path, away from the stone. He had been  warned not to run, and could not, as he would rapidly become breathless.  But he could walk quite fast on the flat, and they were soon back at the  gate to the kirk, where the black taxi was waiting, ready to take them.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “Whatever happens,” he said as they climbed into the taxi, “come back to  this place for me. It’s the one thing I do every year. On this day.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “You’ll be back next year,” she said, reaching out to take   his hand.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    On the other side of Edinburgh, in another season, Cat, an attractive  young woman in her mid-twenties, stood at Isabel Dalhousie’s front door,  her finger poised over the bell. She gazed at the stonework. She noticed  that in parts the discoloration was becoming more pronounced. Above the  triangular gable of her aunt’s bedroom window, the stone was flaking  slightly, and a patch had fallen off here and there, like a ripened scab,  exposing fresh skin below. This slow decline had its own charms; a house,  like anything else, should not be denied the dignity of natural  ageing—within reason, of course.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    For the most part, the house was in good order; a discreet and sympathetic  house, in spite of its size. And it was known, too, for its hospitality.  Everyone who called there—irrespective of their mission—would be  courteously received and offered, if the time was appropriate, a glass of  dry white wine in spring and summer and red in autumn and winter. They  would then be listened to, again with courtesy, for Isabel believed in giv-  ing moral attention to everyone. This made her profoundly egalitarian,  though not in the non-discriminating sense of many contemporary  egalitarians, who sometimes ignore the real moral differences between  people (good and evil are not the same, Isabel would say). She felt  uncomfortable with moral relativists and their penchant for  non-judgementalism. But of course we must be judgemental, she said, when  there is something to be judged.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Isabel had studied philosophy and had a part-time job as general editor of  the Review of Applied Ethics. It was not a demanding job in terms of the  time it required, and it was badly paid; in fact, at Isabel’s own  suggestion, rising production costs had been partly offset by a cut in her  own salary. Not that payment mattered; her share of the Louisiana and Gulf  Land Company, left to her by her mother—her sainted American mother, as  she called her—provided more than she could possibly need. Isabel was, in  fact, wealthy, although that was a word that she did not like to use,  especially of herself. She was indifferent   to material wealth, although she was attentive to what she described, with  characteristic modesty, as her minor projects of giving (which were  actually very generous).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “And what are these projects?” Cat had once asked.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Isabel looked embarrassed. “Charitable ones, I suppose. Or eleemosynary if  you prefer long words. Nice word that—eleemosynary . . . But I don’t  normally talk about it.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    Cat frowned. There were things about her aunt that puzzled her. If one  gave to charity, then why not mention it?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “One must be discreet,” Isabel continued. She was not   one for circumlocution, but she believed that one should never refer to  one’s own good works. A good work, once drawn at-  tention to by its author, inevitably became an exercise in  self-congratulation. That was what was wrong with the lists of names of  donors in the opera programmes. Would they have given if their generosity  was not going to be recorded in the programme? Isabel thought that in many  cases they would not. Of course, if the only way one could raise money for  the arts was through appealing to vanity, then it was probably worth  doing. But her own name never appeared in such lists, a fact which had not  gone unnoticed in Edinburgh.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    “She’s mean,” whispered some. “She gives nothing away.”\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e    They were wrong, of course, as the uncharitable so often are. In one year,  Isabel, unrecorded by name in any programme and amongst numerous other  donations, had given eight thousand pounds to Scottish Opera: three  thousand towards a production of Hansel and Gretel, and five thousand to  help secure a fine Italian tenor for a Cavalleria Rusticana performed in  the ill-fitting costumes of nineteen-thirties Italy, complete with  brown-shirted Fascisti in the chorus.","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46303034867941,"sku":"NP9781400077106","price":19.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400077106_eac281db-9569-4dad-90e7-e0f8f05d20a8.jpg?v=1730752819","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/isabel-dalhousie-seriesisbn-9781400077106","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}