Meet Isabel Dalhousie, a female sleuth tackling the mysteries of life among the cobblestones of Edinburgh.
Isabel Dalhousie is an unusual combination of philosopher and amateur detective. Editor of the Review of Applied Ethics—which addresses such topics as ‘Truth telling in sexual relationships’—she also hosts The Sunday Philosophy Club at her home in Edinburgh. Behind the city’s glorious Georgian facades, its moral compasses are spinning with greed, dishonesty, and murderous intent. In the first book in this delightful series, instinct tells Isabel that the young man who tumbled to his death in front of her eyes at the Usher Hall didn’t fall. He was pushed.
One of fiction’s most original and richly written amateur detectives, Isabel Dalhousie is here to pursue the answers to all of life’s mysteries, large or small.
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Excerpt
They went downstairs. A small crowd of people had gathered round the door into the stalls and there was a buzz of conversation. As Isabel and Jennifer drew near, a woman turned to them and said: “Somebody fell from the gods. He’s in there.”
Isabel nodded. “We saw it happen,” she said. “We were up there.”
“You saw it?” said the woman. “You actually saw it?”
“We saw him coming down,’ said Jennifer. “We were in the grand circle. He came down past us.”
“How dreadful,” said the woman. “To see it ... ”
“Yes.”
The woman looked at Isabel with that sudden human intimacy that the witnessing of tragedy permitted.
“I don’t know if we should be standing here,” Isabel muttered, half to Jennifer, half to the other woman. “We’ll just get in the way.”
The other woman drew back. “One wants to do something,” she said lamely.
“I do hope that he’s all right,” said Jennifer. “Falling all that way. He hit the edge of the circle, you know. It might have broken the fall a bit.”
No, thought Isabel, it would have made it worse perhaps; there would be two sets of injuries, the blow from the edge of the circle and injuries on the ground. She looked behind her; there was activity at the front door and then, against the wall, the flashing blue light of the ambulance outside.
“We must let them get through,” said Jennifer, moving away from the knot of people at the door. “The ambulance men will need to get in.”
They stood back as two men in loose green fatigues hurried past, carrying a folded stretcher. They were not long in coming out—less than a minute, it seemed—and then they went past, the young man laid out on the stretcher, his arms folded over his chest. Isabel turned away, anxious not to intrude, but she saw his face before she averted her gaze. She saw the halo of tousled dark hair and the fine features, undamaged. To be so beautiful, she thought, and now the end. She closed her eyes. She felt raw inside, empty. This poor young man, loved by somebody somewhere, whose world would end this evening, she thought, when the cruel news was broached. All that love invested in a future that would not materialise, ended in a second, in a fall from the gods.
