{"product_id":"morality-for-beautiful-girls-isbn-9781400031368","title":"Morality for Beautiful Girls","description":"\u003cb\u003eFans around the world adore the bestselling No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series and its proprietor, Precious Ramotswe, Botswana’s premier lady detective. In this charming series, Mma  Ramotswe—with help from her loyal associate, Grace Makutsi—navigates her cases and her personal life with wisdom, good humor, and the occasional cup of tea.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003cbr\u003eIn \u003cb\u003eMorality for Beautiful Girls\u003c\/b\u003e, Precious Ramotswe, founder and owner of the only detective agency for the concerns of both ladies and others, investigates the alleged poisoning of the brother of an important “Government Man,” and the moral character of the four finalists of the Miss Beauty and Integrity Contest, the winner of which will almost certainly be a contestant for the title of Miss Botswana. Yet her business is having money problems, and when other difficulties arise at her fiancé’s Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, she discovers the reliable Mr J.L.B. Matekoni is more complicated then he seems.NATIONAL BESTSELLER\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“The Miss Marple of Botswana.” \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times Book Review\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e \u003c\/i\u003e“I was enchanted   by the character of Precious Ramotswe and the sly humor of Alexander McCall Smith’s   writing, his deft evocation of a culture.” Anthony Minghella\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e “Thoroughly engaging   and entertaining.” \u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003eALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH is the author of the international phenomenon The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series, the Isabel Dalhousie Series, the Portuguese Irregular Verbs series, the 44 Scotland Street series and the Corduroy Mansions series. He is professor emeritus of medical law at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland and has served with many national and international organizations concerned with bioethics. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and was a law professor at the University of Botswana.CHAPTER ONE\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe World as Seen by\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAnother Person\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMma Ramotswe, the daughter of the late Obed Ramotswe of Mochudi, near  Gaborone, Botswana, Africa, was the announced fiancée of Mr J.L.B.  Matekoni, son of the late Pumphamilitse Matekoni, of Tlokweng,  peasant farmer and latterly chief caretaker of the Railway Head  Office. It was a fine match, everybody thought; she, the founder and  owner of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Botswana's only  detective agency for the concerns of both ladies and others; he, the  proprietor of Tlokweng Road Speedy Motors, and by general repute one  of the finest mechanics in Botswana. It was always a good thing,  people said, to have independent interests in a marriage. Traditional  marriages, in which the man made all the decisions and controlled  most of the household assets, were all very well for women who wanted  to spend their time cooking and looking after children, but times had  changed, and for educated women who wanted to make something of their  lives, it was undoubtedly better for both spouses to have something  to do.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThere were many examples of such marriages. There was that of Mma  Maketetse, for example, who had set up a small factory specialising  in the making of khaki shorts for schoolboys. She had started with a  cramped and ill-ventilated sewing room at the back of her house, but  by employing her cousins to cut and sew for her she had built up one  of Botswana's best businesses, exporting khaki shorts to Namibia in  the face of stiff competition from large clothing factories in the  Cape. She had married Mr Cedric Maketetse, who ran two bottle stores  in Gaborone, the capital, and had recently opened a third in  Francistown. There had been a faintly embarrassing article about them  in the local paper, with the catchy headline: Shorts manufacturing  lady buttons it up with drink merchant. They were both members of the  Chamber of Commerce, and it was clear to all that Mr Maketetse was  immensely proud of his wife's business success.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOf course, a woman with a successful business had to be careful that  a man who came courting her was not merely looking for a way of  spending the rest of his days in comfort. There had been plenty of  cases of that happening, and Mma Ramotswe had noticed that the  consequences of such unions were almost inevitably dire. The man  would either drink or gamble away the profits of his wife's  enterprise, or he would try to run the business and destroy it in the  process. Men were good at business, thought Mma Ramotswe, but women  were just as good. Women were thriftier by nature; they had to be,  trying to run households on a tight budget and feed the ever-open  mouths of children. Children ate so much, it seemed, and one could  never cook enough pumpkin or porridge to fill their hungry bellies.  And as for men, they never seemed happier than when eating large  quantities of expensive meat. It was all rather discouraging.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"That will be a good marriage,\" people said, when they heard of her  engagement to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. \"He is a reliable man, and she is a  very good woman. They will be very happy running their businesses and  drinking tea together.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMma Ramotswe was aware of this popular verdict on her engagement and  shared the sentiment. After her disastrous marriage to Note Mokoti,  the jazz trumpeter and incorrigible ladies' man, she had decided that  she would never remarry, in spite of frequent offers. Indeed, she had  initially turned down Mr J.L.B. Matekoni when he had first proposed,  only to accept him some six months later. She had realised that the  best test of a prospective husband involves no more than the asking  of a very simple question, which every woman--or at least every woman  who has had a good father--can pose and to which she will know the answer in her bones. She had asked herself this question in respect  of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, and the answer had been unambiguous.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"And what would my late Daddy have thought of him?\" she said to  herself. She posed the question after she had accepted Mr J.L.B.  Matekoni, as one might ask oneself whether one had taken the right  turning at a road junction. She remembered where she had been when  she asked it. She was taking an evening walk near the dam, along one  of those paths that led this way and that through the thorn bushes.  She had suddenly stopped, and looked up at the sky, into that faint,  washed out blue that would suddenly, at the approach of sunset,  become streaked with copper-red. It was a quiet time of the day, and  she was utterly alone. And so she spoke the question out loud, as if  there were somebody there to hear it.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe looked up at the sky, half-expecting the answer to be there. But  of course it was not, and she knew it anyway, without the need to  look. There was no doubt in her mind that Obed Ramotswe, who had seen  every sort of man during the time he had worked in those distant  mines, and who knew the foibles of all of them, would have approved  of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. And if that were the case, then she should  have no fears about her future husband. He would be kind to her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eNow, sitting in the office of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency with  her assistant, Mma Makutsi, the most distinguished graduate of her  year at the Botswana Secretarial College, she reflected on the  decisions which her impending marriage to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would  oblige her to take. The most immediate issue, of course, had been  where they might live. That had been decided rather quickly; Mr  J.L.B. Matekoni's house near the old Botswana Defence Club,  attractive though it undoubtedly was, with its old colonial verandah  and its shiny tin roof, was not as suitable as her own house in Zebra  Drive. His garden was sparse; little more than a swept yard, in fact;  whereas she had a good collection of paw-paw trees, some very shady  acacias, and a well-established melon patch. Moreover, when it came  to the interiors, there was little to recommend Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's  spartan corridors and unlived-in rooms, especially when compared with  the layout of her own house. It would be a great wrench, she felt, to  abandon her living room, with its comfortable rug on the red-polished  concrete floor, her mantelpiece with her commemorative plate of Sir  Sereste Khama, Paramount Chief, Statesman, and first President of  Botswana, and, in the corner, her treadle sewing machine that still  worked so well, even in a power cut when more modern sewing machines  would fall silent.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe had not had to say very much about it. In fact, the decision in  favour of Zebra Drive did not even have to be spelled out. After Mr  J.L.B. Matekoni had been persuaded by Mma Potokwane, the matron at  the orphan farm, to act as foster father to an orphaned boy and his  crippled sister, the children had moved into her house and  immediately settled in. After that, it was accepted that the whole  family would, in due course, live in Zebra Drive. For the time being,  Mr J.L.B. Matekoni would continue to live in his own house, but would  take his evening meal at Zebra Drive.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThat was the easy part of the arrangement. Now there remained the  issue of the business. As Mma Ramotswe sat at her desk, watching Mma  Makutsi shuffling papers in the filing cabinet of their small office,  her thoughts were taken up with the difficult task that lay ahead of  her. It had not been an easy decision to make, but she had now made  it and she would have to steel herself and put it into effect. That  was what business was all about.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eOne of the most elementary rules of running a business was that  facilities should not be needlessly duplicated. After she and Mr  J.L.B. Matekoni married, they would have two businesses with two  offices. They were very different concerns, of course, but Tlokweng  Road Speedy Motors had a large amount of office space and it would  make a great deal of sense for Mma Ramotswe to run her agency from  there. She had made a close inspection of Mr J.L.B. Matekoni's  building and had even obtained advice from a local builder.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"There will be no difficulty,\" he had said after inspecting the  garage and its office. \"I can put in a new door on that side over  there. Then the clients for your business can come in and not have  anything to do with all those greasy goings-on in the workshop.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eCombining the two offices would enable Mma Ramotswe to let out her  own office and the income derived from that would make all the  difference. At present, the uncomfortable truth about the No. 1  Ladies' Detective Agency was that it was simply not making enough  money. It was not that there were no clients--there had been a ready  supply of those--it was just that detective work was immensely  time-consuming and people were simply unable to pay for her services  if she charged at a realistic hourly rate. A couple of hundred pula  for the resolution of uncertainty or for the finding of a missing  person was affordable, and usually well worth it, but several  thousand pula for the same job was another matter altogether. Doubt  could be preferable to sure knowledge if the difference between the  two was a large sum of money.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe business might have broken even if it were not for the wages  which Mma Ramotswe had to pay Mma Makutsi. She had originally  employed her as a secretary, on the grounds that every business which  wished to be taken seriously had to have a secretary, but had soon  realised the talents that lay behind those large spectacles. Mma  Makutsi had been promoted to assistant detective, a position that  gave her the status she so craved. But Mma Ramotswe had felt obliged  to raise her pay at the same time, thus plunging the agency's current  account further into the red.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe had discussed the matter with Mr J.L.B. Matekoni, who had agreed  with her that she had very little choice.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"If you continue like this,\" he said gravely, \"you'll end up  bankrupt. I've seen that happen to businesses. They appoint somebody  called a judicial manager. He is like a vulture, circling, circling.  It is a very bad thing to happen to a business.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMma Ramotswe clicked her tongue. \"I do not want that,\" she said. \"It  would be a very sad end to the business.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThey had looked at one another glumly. Then Mr J.L.B. Matekoni spoke.  \"You'll have to sack her,\" he said. \"I've had to sack mechanics in  the past. It is not easy, but that is what business is about.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"She was so happy when I promoted her,\" said Mma Ramotswe quietly. \"I  can't suddenly tell her that she is no longer a detective. She has no  people here in Gaborone. Her people are up in Bobonong. They are very  poor, I think.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMr J.L.B. Matekoni shook his head. \"There are many poor people,\" he  said. \"Many of these people are suffering badly. But you cannot keep  a business going on air. That is well-known. You have to add what you  get in and then take away what you spend. The difference is your  profit. In your case, there is a minus sign in front of that figure.  You cannot . . .\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I cannot,\" broke in Mma Ramotswe. \"I cannot sack her now. I am like  her mother. She wants so much to be a detective and she is  hardworking.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMr J.L.B. Matekoni looked down at his feet. He suspected that Mma  Ramotswe was expecting him to propose something, but he was not quite  sure what it was. Did she expect him to give her money? Did she want  him to meet the bills of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, even  though she had made it so clear that she expected him to keep to his  garage business while she attended to her clients and their  unsettling problems?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"I do not want you to pay,\" said Mma Ramotswe, looking at him with a  firmness that made him both fear and admire her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Of course not,\" he said hurriedly. \"I was not thinking that at all.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"On the other hand,\" went on Mma Ramotswe, \"you do need a secretary  at the garage. Your bills are always in a mess, are they not? You  never keep a note of what you pay those useless apprentices of yours.  I should imagine that you make loans to them, too. Do you keep a  record?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMr J.L.B. Matekoni looked shifty. How had she found out that the  apprentices each owed him over six hundred pula and had shown no  signs of being able to repay it?\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Do you want her to come and work for me?\" he asked, surprised at the  suggestion. \"What about her detective position?\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMma Ramotswe did not answer for a moment. She had not worked anything  out, but a plan was now beginning to take shape. If they moved her  office to the garage, then Mma Makutsi could keep her job as  assistant detective while at the same time she could do the  secretarial work that the garage needed. Mr J.L.B. Matekoni could pay  her a wage for that, which would mean that the agency's accounts  would be relieved of a large part of that burden. This, coupled with  the rent which she would receive for the existing offices, would make  the financial position look considerably healthier.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eShe explained her proposal to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. Although he had  always expressed doubts as to Mma Makutsi's usefulness, he could see  the attractions of Mma Ramotswe's scheme, not the least of which was  that it would keep her happy. And that, he knew, was what he wanted  above all else.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMma Ramotswe cleared her throat.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"Mma Makutsi,\" she began. \"I have been thinking about the future.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eMma Makutsi, who had finished her rearranging of the filing cabinet,  had made them both a cup of bush tea and was settling down to the  half-hour break that she usually took at eleven in the morning. She  had started to read a magazine--an old copy of the National  Geographic--which her cousin, a teacher, had lent her.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\"The future? Yes, that is always interesting. But not as interesting  as the past, I think. There is a very good article in this magazine,  Mma Ramotswe,\" she said. \"I will lend it to you after I have finished  reading it. It is all about our ancestors up in East Africa. There is  a Dr Leakey there. He is a very famous doctor of bones.\"","brand":"Anchor","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46302238671077,"sku":"NP9781400031368","price":17.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9781400031368.jpg?v=1767732960","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/morality-for-beautiful-girls-isbn-9781400031368","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}