Check the Insider each Tuesday for your weekly dose of reading recommendation excitement!

This week’s review:

The Colors of All the Cattle | Alexander McCall Smith | 2018, 228 pages | Fiction/Mystery

The Colors of All the Cattle is the latest in this series set in Botswana, Africa, featuring detective Precious Ramotswe. Precious has a full and happy life. She owns the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency and runs it with the help of Mma Makutsi. She is married and has two young children. Her friend Mma Potokwane pressures her to run for City Council. There is a plan to build a tacky Big Fun Hotel next to a graveyard and someone on the Council must help stop it from being constructed. Precious doesn’t want to run, and though she first agrees, she then tries to back out of it. But then she realizes that it is her duty to run. An old family friend comes to Mma Ramotswe for her help with a hit and run accident. Charlie, her part-time assistant, is eager to solve the case. But the investigation proves dangerous for him. He is also troubled about his romance with Queenie-Queenie. Her family is very wealthy, and Charlies worries what she will think when she finds out how poor he is.

There is a vibrant sense of place in this mystery. The characters are charming and their troubles believable. People take care of each other and try to do the right thing. Precious uses her unique talents and common sense to solve problems. And she looks on life with humor, compassion and joy.

Robbin Bailey, Reference Librarian