The Good Husband of Zebra Drive by Alexander McCall Smith (2007, Hardcover, Large Print)

It has been some time since I read my last novel of the Number 1 Ladies' Detective Agency Series, and I was originally displeased with this book. I thought about giving it 4 stars. Then I thought, I opened the book after dinner and finished it before bedtime: how bad can a book be if you don't put it down?

What I disliked was the realty of the characters, the realty of the issues, the realty that Botswana is modernizing. Mma Makutsi, like my teenager at home, too often chides other people, in a rude and in-your-face fashion. The new cases walking through their doors are not cow thieves or simple questions of trust. Clients seek to discover employees who steal - even though the employers are generous. Stock trading scandals are discovered. What next: pollution violations? Botswana now has modern day issues. Botswana is an uglier place.

McCall Smith seems less enchanted by the "Leave It To Beaver" simplicity of many of its gloriously gentle citizens. "There were all those unkindnesses, palpable, daily; so easily avoidable; but one could not think of those, thought Mma Ramotswe, or one would spend one's time in tears - and the unkindness would continue. So the small things came into their own: small acts of helping others, if one could; small ways of making one's own life better; acts of love, acts of tea, acts of laughter. Clever people might laugh at such simplicity, but, she asked herself, what was their solution?"

Botswana is changing, but it is not dead. McCall Smith reminds us, "That fine country, with its good people, was still there. . . "

Reading these books is like getting out of the rat race and flying off to where life is simpler, better. Social standards seem so good in Botswana. Maybe the "good old days" were better in Botswana than they are today; but, the present days still have a lot of good.

After engaging the characters in numerous "new vocations" whether from malaise or midlife crisis, the author has our beloved J.L.B. Matekoni return to his auto mechanic's life as Matekoni realizes that, "The things that we do best. . . are the things that we have always done best."

Among all of the series written by McCall Smith, this is his best. And we can only hope that he realizes this fact and continues to do his best by delivering more novels for this series.