‘Double Comfort Safari Club’ lives up to its name

We all should be so lucky as to know someone like Precious Ramotswe. She’s a listener, a confidant, a person of boundless common sense. And she can solve the thorniest of problems, the mysteries that complicate the human condition.

The owner of Botswana’s No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency confronts a new set of puzzles in "The Double Comfort Safari Club," the latest in Alexander McCall Smith’s popular series. She is called upon to travel to a safari camp in Botswana’s beautiful countryside to find the inheritor of a legacy. A one-time visitor to the camp has bequeathed a large sum of money to a guide who showed her great kindness. But which guard?

Meanwhile, Grace Makutsi, Mma Ramotswe’s assistant — to be accurate, assistant detective and honors graduate of the Botswana Secretarial College with the unprecedented score of 97 percent on the final exam — faces a crisis. Her fiance, Mr. Phuti Radiphuti, owner of the Double Comfort Furniture Shop, is severely injured and falls into the clutches of a hostile family member. Mma Makutsi’s hard-fought happiness is in danger of disappearing along with the man she loves.

What person who walks this earth is shielded from the vagaries of the heart? A local priest approaches Mma Ramotswe with fear that his spouse loves another. Can Mma find out for him? Then the woman in question, Mma Ramotswe’s friend, confides in her — that she fears her husband has been unfaithful. What is the truth? And what will Precious Ramotswe do when she discovers it?

Kindness, great good sense and gentle humor lace this latest Ladies’ Detective Agency mystery, set against the lush, exotic backdrop of the southern African nation of Botswana. Love of fellow man, love of one’s beautiful country and love of the traditional old ways pervade the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency mysteries. These gentle, wistful, entertaining books well deserve their cult following and have earned Mma Ramotswe her own BBC-HBO television series.