The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency

Alexander McCall Smith, Jg. 1948, wuchs in Zimbabwe und Schottland auf und lebt in Edinburgh mit seiner Frau, zwei Kindern und einer Katze. Er war bis vor kurzem Professor für Medizinrecht. Der erklärte Musikliebhaber spielt das Fagott, unter anderem im 'Really Terrible Orchestra', das er mit gegründet hat. Er veröffentlichte zahlreiche Fach- und Kinderbücher, bevor ihm mit der 'The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency' und der Krimi-Reihe mit Isabel Dalhousie Welterfolge gelangen. Die Romane dieser Reihe werden in 42 Ländern veröffentlicht.

'The author's prose has the merits of simplicity, euphony and precision.' Anthony Daniels, SUNDAY TELEGRAPH 'Everything about [McCall Smith] is appealing. He's just full of delight - it just bubbles out of him' SUNDAY HERALD 'A rare pleasure' DAILY TELEGRAPH 'A publishing phenomenon' GUARDIAN 'Indeed, the effort involved would have been justified by just one of them, THE NO.1 LADIES' DETECTIVE AGENCY' Gerald Kaufman, Chairman of the 1999 BOOKER Prize Jury 'The beauty of the land, the people, the colours and smells are conveyed with such warmth that you find yourself laughing and crying instead of, as so often, hardening your heart against the seeming hopelessness of an entire continent. I can think of no author save Dickens who achieved such an effect, and no author writing today so deserving of an enormous audience.' NEW STATESMAN 'This crime novel is in a category of its own...Precious Ramotswe herself is unforgettable... But if Precious is the heroine of this gem of a series, then Botswana is its hero. Rarely in fiction, has a country been depicted so lovingly.' GOOD BOOK GUIDE 'Creating a genuinely original character in an already overcrowded field of crime fiction is no mean feat. But in a genre crowded with wisecracking mavericks, recovering alcoholics with anger-management problems and kick-boxing female FBI agents, it's fair to say that in Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's finest- and only- woman detective, McCall Smith has broken the mould.' OBSERVER