April 1, 2022
Even as Grace Makutsi's husband faces cutthroat competition from an international firm seeking to price him out of the office furniture market with a sleezy campaign touting subpar products, he and Mma Makutsi agree to help a friend's troubled child. Mma Ramotswe and grande dame Mma Potokwani pitch in, and the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency triumphs again.
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Starred review from August 1, 2022
McCall Smith choreographs an ingenious "trickster tricked" plot here, centered on a swarm of cutthroat businesspeople and one surly teenager. Precious Ramotswe, founder of the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Botswana's only private-investigations business run by women, is on the case in this twenty-third adventure in the series. First on the agenda is a plot that might destroy the Double Comfort Furniture Store, the life's work of Phuti, the husband of Precious' friend and colleague, Grace Makutsi. A rival business, specializing in minimalist "Twenty-first Century Chairs," is slashing prices and using the alluring, ever-scheming Violet Sephotho (sworn enemy of Grace Makutsi) in its advertising. Then there's the surly teenager and his role in derailing the happiness of Grace's childhood friend, a woman who was forced, as a teen herself, to bear a child after being raped. Precious and Grace join forces in an elaborate sting operation designed to expose these agents of mayhem. Their plot includes concocting an ad campaign of their own and hiring an actor to play a domestic scene. As they would sink into one of Phuti's large, overstuffed, extremely comfortable armchairs, so will readers delightedly immerse themselves in descriptions of the Botswana landscape; in Precious and Grace's conversations over mugs of red bush tea; and in the doings of the rest of the cast of comic characters. Another delight from the prolific McCall Smith.
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