Comforts of a Muddy Saturday (Isabel Dalhousie Series #5) by Alexander McCall Smith

From the Publisher

Isabel’s incandescent curiosity is piqued when she is asked to help a professor of medicine who has been disgraced by allegations of scientific fraud concerning a newly marketed drug. Would a doctor with a stellar reputation make such a simple but grave mistake? If not, what explains the tragic accident that resulted in the death of a patient?

An investigation is in order, especially since a man’s reputation is in jeopardy, and a great deal of money is at stake for the pharmaceutical company involved.

She’s also occupied by the envy she feels in the face of Jamie’s new friendship with the composer-in-residence at the University of Edinburgh. Whatever the case, whatever the solution, Isabel’s combination of spirit, smarts, curiosity, empathy and unabashed nosiness guarantees a delightful adventure.

Publishers Weekly

In Smith's winning fifth novel to feature Edinburgh philosophical sleuth Isabel Dalhousie (after The Careful Use of Compliments), Dalhousie, who's recently assumed ownership of the obscure journal she's edited for many years, the Review of Applied Ethics, applies her deductive gifts to the case of a disgraced doctor. When a patient dies after taking a new antibiotic that Marcus Moncrieff deemed safe in clinical trials, the doctor's original report turns out to contain falsified data. Did Moncrieff skew the data to please the drug manufacturers? Moncrieff's wife turns to Isabel for help in lifting her husband out of his despondency. While the truth isn't straightforward, the motives of the guilty party prove to be both plausible and rational. The strengths of the book, as with Smith's better known No. 1 Ladies' Detective series, lie in its protagonist's determination to treat others without judgment-and in the author's revealing glimpses into the human soul. (Sept.)

Kirkus Reviews

Even more than her first four adventures, Isabel Dalhousie's fifth is a record of complications that constantly challenge her ethical faculties while charmingly failing to disturb her tranquility. What happens when Professor Christopher Dove, who schemed unsuccessfully in The Careful Use of Compliments (2007) to replace Isabel as editor of the Review of Applied Ethics, sends her an article on the venerable Trolley Problem? After due thought, Isabel sends it out to two readers, just as she would a contribution by anyone else. What happens when her niece Cat takes a holiday in Sri Lanka with her current lover? Isabel manages Cat's delicatessen in her absence, of course. When Cat's assistant Eddie, a damaged boy, asks Isabel for money, she agrees to give it, come what may in the way of second thoughts. And when she suspects that American composer Nick Smart is interested in more than musical collaboration with Jamie, Cat's ex-lover and the father of Isabel's son Charlie, she cycles through one emotional reaction after another before the unsurprising resolution. In the thread most closely approximating an orthodox mystery, Stella Moncrieff pleads with Isabel to exonerate her husband, a physician in disgrace for allegedly altering information on the clinical trials of a new anti-MRSA drug and causing a man's death. Isabel is so perturbed that she wonders at one point if she's actually being threatened. Yet all ends quietly. Another insubstantial yet deeply rooted paean to Isabel's status as an "intermeddler" whose reasoning begins where other literary sleuths' ends.

Product Details

• ISBN: 0375425136
  
• ISBN-13: 9780375425134
• Format: Hardcover, 288pp
• Publisher: Knopf Publishing Group
• Pub. Date: September 23, 2008
• Sales Rank: 772
• Series: Isabel Dalhousie Series, #5