McCall Smith in Edinburgh

WRITER'S BLOCK

IN ALEXANDER MCCALL SMITH'S latest book Friends, Lovers, Chocolate, the protagonist, Isabel Dalhousie, muses about her feelings for her young friend Jamie, who used to be her niece's boyfriend.

She wants Jamie to be happy but feels a tinge of jealousy when she sees him with another young woman. She wishes him the best in his professional life but is shaken when a great new job might take him to another city.

What's interesting about all this isn't that Isabel has these feelings but that she's continually thinking about them, turning them over in her mind, monitoring her own emotions. Not that this prevents her from enjoying the odd inappropriate thought "" imagining a young man she doesn't like being swallowed up in an avalanche while skiing, for instance.

Reflecting long and hard on issues of morality is Isabel's job (she is an Edinburgh-based philosopher, editor of the Review of Applied Ethics), but such vignettes are typical of McCall Smith's writing.

Though his books follow a cosy armchair format that's reminiscent in some superficial ways of Agatha Christie, they are as much about carefully studying moral conundrums as about solving mysteries. (In fact, absorbing though the plots are, these aren't mysteries in a conventional sense "" you'll rarely find dramatic climactic confrontations, for instance.)

Friends, Lovers, Chocolate is the second book in a new series by the medical law professor, who writes prolifically during his off-hours: its predecessor was The Sunday Philosophy Club, in which Isabel tries to work out whether the death of a young man who fell (right before her eyes) from the upper circle of a theatre was a case of accident, suicide or murder.

"We have moral obligations to those who we come up against, who enter our moral space," she explained to a friend then, "I was the last person that young man saw, and don't you think the last person you see on this earth owes you something?"

These new books have large boots to fill, since they will invariably be compared with the author's earlier, phenomenally successful series (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency and its five sequels), featuring Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's only female private detective. But though Precious has cast a long shadow, the first two titles in the Isabel Dalhousie series have certainly lived up to the hype.

McCall Smith has been criticised for sometimes being too pat, even smug. Perhaps inevitably, given the kind of self-conscious reflecting his characters engage in, an element of preachiness is never that far away.

More seriously, he has been accused of exoticising Africa in the Precious Ramotswe books. Those who felt that way might feel he does the same in his new series to the Scotland of Robert Burns songs; but then, the objections are likely to be fewer in the case of a first-world country.

Whatever the reservations though, there's something bright and warm about any McCall Smith book "" starting from the colourful relief-print cover illustrations by Hannah Firmin.

Fans love his gentle humour, the likeable characters, the little insights he provides into different cultures and the general warmth that runs through his work. The new series is no different.