The Right Attitude to Rain

Edinburgh philosopher and ethics journal editor Isabel Dalhousie finds herself drawn into the romantic entanglements of her niece Cat and simultaneously navigating the unsettling attentions of Tom Bruce, a wealthy Texan visiting the city with his much younger fiancée. Alexander McCall Smith's third Isabel Dalhousie novel uses the mild social dramas of Edinburgh's professional classes as a backdrop for Isabel's ongoing philosophical examination of when interference becomes obligation and silence becomes complicity.

Davina Porter has become so thoroughly identified with this series that her warm, Scottish-inflected narration feels like the natural medium through which these books exist. She gives Isabel's interior philosophical musings the same easy confidence as her social conversations, making the ethical reasoning feel like a natural part of how this character moves through the world rather than a lecture embedded in a novel.