Rating: 
Summary: Number One Heroine; Fascinating Setting
Review: This is an unpretentious book, in size and scope, but its entertainment value is immense. There are no car chases or shoot-outs; no great earth-shattering truths are revealed. The heroine, Smith's "Number One Lady Detective," is in fact Batswana's ONLY lady detective. But she and those she deals with in her brand-new profession--her friends, clients and victims--were enough to keep me turning the pages. Precious Ramotswe is a delight. She is plump, shrewd and opinionated, as at home in her village and her country as Tony Hillerman's Jim Chee is on his reservation. She solves her little mysteries with a logic, dogged resourcefulness and sense of humor that are quietly brilliant. Smith's prose is well-crafted, spare and subtle; he doesn't beat a reader over the head with Africa and its history, but lets us witness both the uniqueness and the universality of Precious' small-town, open-country world through her very human eyes. I'm hooked; I'm looking forward to reading the rest of the series.Susan O'Neill, Author: Don't Mean Nothing: Short Stories of Viet Nam
Rating:
Summary: Not just a great detective book--a great book, period!
Review: I came to this book after having had many, many people recommend it to me. When I get that kind of Invasion-of-the-Body-Snatchers thumbs-up, I tend to get stubborn, suspecting a mass-marketing push of some sort. The more fool me. In this case, the price for my stubbornness definitely came off my own hide.
Fortunately, my niece's plane was late to land a couple of weeks ago, so I picked this up at the airport bookstore and started to read it. I was immediately hooked.
As you can read above, this amazing volume follows the exploits of Mma Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's first female detective. We watch her set up her office, solve her first few cases, and eventually unlock a mystery that peers into the dark (and banal) heart of human evil. But to call this a detective novel is almost a disservice to Mr. Smith's wonderful book. Mysteries, in general, fall into a very few, well-established sub-genres: the Cozy, the Hardboiled Detective, the Police Procedural, the Thriller. Every one of these types has a very clear set of standard gimmicks--tropes--that let you know what's going on. Even books that mix genres (like Jim Butcher's Harry Dresden novels which mix fantasy with hardboiled, or Laura Joh Rowland's Sano Ichiro series and Patricia Cornwell's Kay Scarpetta books, both of which tend to shift from procedural to thriller) tend to show great respect for the genre. But this book seems to ignore the traditional forms of the detective novel altogether. It is, first and formost, a novel, a work of literary fiction. Its main subject is the soul of the people of Botswana, as viewed through the lens of Mma Ramotswe herself. Yes, she solves mysteries. But it is more in the fashion of Solomon or Judge Ooka than Sherlock Holmes or Sam Spade. She is a master of the human soul. She understands people, and why they do the silly things they do, and so she inevitably manages to uncover the answers to questions that others can't seem to solve.
Part of the beauty of the book is that Smith's deceptively simple storytelling style all but forces the reader to fall in love with Precious. She is so admirable, so endearing that you have no choice. You know she's going to solve the case, and that, as long as she is working on the problem, everything's going to be all right. By way of example--and I'm not going to give away too much here--about half way through the book, an incident occurs that is, on many levels, quite horrific. Smith handles the scene beautifully, simply and terrifyingly. It is the sort of scene that has broken my suspension of disbelief in several previous thrillers. Yet, because of Smith's style and Mma Ramotswe's charm and perseverance, I felt enough trust to continue on. That trust was rewarded. The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency solved the case in most satisfactory fashion.
For me, knowing of southern Africa mostly through novels and horrific news reports, it was a joy to get to know Botswana on so personal and believable a level.
Rating: 
Summary: just ok
Review: This book was just okay. Very slow moving, not riveting or fast-paced at all. Good for a slow day on the porch. It will not keep you up at night page-turning that's for sure. The main storyline was predictable. The good thing was that it was short.
Rating:
Summary: What a great introduction to Mma Ramotswe and Botswana
Review: The first book of the series started slowly because I expected a conventional mystery (Mma Ramotswe is a detective, after all). Instead, these are gentle plots that reveal characters and the modern story of Africa. The writing and, for me, unfamiliar rubrics of daily conversation in Botswana soon completely captivated me. These three novels hang together nicely and they do not seem in any sense repetitive. Characters develop and change as the series moves along. The only thing many readers say as they close the cover of the last of the three books (No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Tears of the Giraffe, and Morality for Beautiful Girls) in this set is, "More! More!" The set will be a great Christmas present for a number of the readers on my list.
Rating:
Summary: Simply wonderful stories and evocative descriptions
Review: It took a few weeks for me really to get into this book. For me, it started slowly, but then I began to love the descriptions of Africa as much as the gentle mysteries that move this book along. The best proof of the book's general appeal is that I have given away at least a half dozen copies and have received warm thanks from everyone. It is a marvelous book and its episodic aspect makes it well suited to reading aloud.
Rating: 
Summary: I enjoyed it greatly
Review: Congratulations to Ms Smith. A fun read. Reminded me of my own Beauford Sloan Mystery series. Raymond Austin
Television director of The Saint, The Avengers, Hawaii Five-O, Magnum, P.I., Hart to Hart, Jag, etc.
And author of "The Eagle Heist" and "Dead Again"
Rating:
Summary: No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
Review: I left Africa at the age of 6, never to return. Until I read this book, my memories were few and far between. What a special thrill then, for the first time in fifty years, to taste fresh sugar cane in my mouth, thanks to Alexander McCall Smith's loving evocation. Sights, long forgotten, the smell of Africa came flooding back, as I raced through the pages of this book. In terms of detective fiction, I am no virgin. Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, Christie, Chandler, Hammett, Rankin, Paretsky, Deaver, Cruz Smith et al crowd bulging bookshelves all around the house. How refreshing it was to discover a new and subtle voice. These pages are not littered with corpses, gratuitous violence, car chases or soft pornography. In a lecture last week, I heard Alan Plater say, that in all his years, he had never seen a fight, let alone a crime. Why should he then litter his screen plays with events of which he, and I suspect most of the rest us, had no experience? If you want to experience a vicarious thrill, don't look for it here. There is more than enough mystery in the normal run of life. Precious Ramotswe can get the answers to the questions she needs to ask without the use of a gun or a blackjack. Heroes and heroines don't have to be misfits on the edge. They don't have to be perfect. They can have very simple dreams, yet their stories can still be riveting. It says something about this book that, without all the usual suspects, I still could not put it down until I had finished and that I raced out to buy 'Tears of the Giraffe' as soon as I had.
Rating: 
Summary: quirky
Review: Not your typical mystery. Not worth all the hype
Rating:
Summary: Enchanting!
Review: Alexander McCall Smith's novel The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, set in Botswana is a thrill to read. The characters capture your heart, especially the lady detective, Precious Ramotswe. The history of her life growing up in Botswana, and that of her father are as engaging as the mysteries she solves. A brave and cunning woman, Mma Ramotswe and her adventures make for a great read. This book has found a place on my 'favorites' shelf. I highly recommend this delightful book!
Rating:
Summary: Different, gently funny, refreshing
Review: For a book so utterly unassuming and undemanding, this first volume in the adventures of Botswana's only lady detective, Precious Ramotswe, accomplishes an impressive amount. It gives us, first of all, a fictional character who breathes. Mma Ramotswe has none of the infallible intelligence, the glamor or colorful pugnacity of stock detective fiction. She is an ordinary woman nearing middle age - but it would be more accurate to praise her as "perfectly ordinary." Her considerable girth is emblematic of her general solidity: ambling through one small case after another, rarely sure of the next step, succeeding not because of brilliance but by dint of cheerful confidence, good humor and common sense. It gives us, second, a glimpse into the day to day life of a modern African town. It is perhaps a little exotic to us, but it is perfectly natural to Mma Ramotswe, and her familiarity with and affection for the social order, the dry expanses of the Kalahari, the flow of favors expended and called in, lure us into seeing it all simply from her point of view, as just the way things are at home. It kept reminding me, oddly enough, of the small town life in Tom Sawyer. There have been many presentations of Africa as the Dark Continent. Here we have a credible portrait of it as the Sunny Continent, as it can be in those times and polities where history is kind enough to leave it alone for a while. It gives us, third, a break. The language is as simple and direct, though not as self-consciously so, as Hemingway's. Even when witchcraft and child murder darken the storyline, the pace is unhurried, the goodness of a shared cup of tea and a back porch conversation celebrated. The pain of all Africa's history touches our heroine's life, and colors the edges of the story; the vastness of the interior somehow generates and gets reflected in the personal dignity of the townspeople; yet everything takes place on a human scale. It is hard to imagine anyone sitting down with this book and coming away less than disarmed.
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