The Sunday Philosophy Club Alexander McCall Smith Little, Brown, 281pp, £14.99 ISBN 0316728179

Imagine a reader somewhere outside Maun, on the banks of the Boro River. Her back is resting against the dirt wall of her camp, her feet on the stump of a weeping Boer bean tree, as lilac-breasted rollers loop and twist above her head. They won't be distracting her, though, because she is entranced by the story of a thin, acerbic bluestocking from a genteel corner of Edinburgh.

Alexander McCall Smith, ethicist, law professor and amateur bassoonist, is best known for his series of novels about a large lady detective from Gaborone called Mma Precious Ramotswe. With their stout belief in common sense, the good of Botswana and the restorative effects of red bush tea, these slim books with their lovely titles - Morality for Beautiful Girls, Tears of the Giraffe - have charmed a host of readers around the world.

Now we have a slightly longer book, featuring Isabel Dalhousie, a "waspish female sleuth" from Edinburgh. I imagine the reader by the Boro because the books set in Botswana have always had an air of foreignness that offers balm to one's slight sense of incredulity. Ms Dalhousie has no such protection. I am an Edinburgher, and she is the kind who should walk past my window, day in and day out.

Ms Dalhousie lives in Merchiston, an area beside the Union Canal known optimistically as Edinburgh's "Left Bank", owing to it being home to McCall Smith and his fellow writers Ian Rankin and J K Rowling. Ms Dalhousie was once married to a man called John Liamor, but he proved to be a liar, amor. The shock of loving a bad man still scars her, although she isn't without a pulse, liking "Scotsmen who look Mediterranean and can sing", especially if they wear their hair "en brosse", which, I think, means like a brush.

In fine crime-fiction style, Ms Dalhousie witnesses a death on the first page when a young man falls from the gods following a recital by the ReykjavIk Symphony at the Usher Hall. His death is adjudged an accident, but Ms Dalhousie, taking time off from complaining about the orchestra's rudeness in subjecting her to Karlheinz Stockhausen, thinks otherwise. Such a sense of purpose allows her to explore Edinburgh, a city McCall Smith chooses to portray traditionally, as being obsessed with finance, the law and the arts.

However, this is all armature. Among many other things, McCall Smith is a member of the International Bioethics Committee of Unesco, and can, if necessary, be very serious. As with his other books, including his landmark Law and Medical Ethics, the real concerns of The Sunday Philosophy Club are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. For McCall Smith, writing is a moral act, offering us hope in difficult times.

What The Sunday Philosophy Club is about, therefore, is whether or not we should get involved. This is a choice Isabel Dalhousie faces repeatedly - as the young man falls from the concert-hall balcony, in the discovery of insider dealing, in finding that her niece has fallen for an unworthy man. Meanwhile, she ponders articles submitted to a journal that she edits, the Review of Applied Ethics, the subject matter of which runs parallel to that of the novel in which she stars.

Many, including the publisher, will make the connection between Ms Dalhousie and Miss Jean Brodie. Yet McCall Smith's satire is much gentler than the stinging denunciation that Muriel Spark dropped on her home city in her most famous book. Despite his amused tickling, McCall Smith clearly loves his city's parsimonious Presbyterian mores, while the great dame suggested its corollary was fascism, and so moved to Tuscany.

McCall Smith's greatest gift as a writer - and God knows this is just one of many gifts the 56-year-old possesses - is that he can write likeable characters. Kindness, combined with mischievousness, marks his heroines, while his villains are soused in self-importance. Gratifyingly, he has no time for those who wear red corduroy trousers, and he is not afraid to express his taste (he likes Peploe, but not Jack Vettriano). He likes foibles and eccentricities and is suspicious of slickness. He is somebody you enjoy spend-ing time with, and that, rightly, makes him a bestseller.

The Sunday Philosophy Club is not quite as easy a book to get on with as the Botswana novels. Much of this can be blamed on McCall Smith, who abandons another of his great abilities, that of turning each chapter of the Botswana novels into a mini-mystery of its own. That is not to say it is a tough book. There are lovely passages in which all the clutter McCall Smith carries in his mind reveals itself. He tells us, for example, that in the 19th century, Germans thought it rude to use a knife on a potato, and wonders whether this had anything to do with the then emperor resembling a King Edward.

There is a dilemma here, however. It is disingenuous to write a book about applying one's ethics while not delving deep into the characters' souls. The odd thing is that McCall Smith is happy to write unpleasant characters. He certainly has the experience to say fascinating things about good and evil. Yet when he pulls his hand from his imagination, he seems unwilling to say anything truly fascinating about what lies revealed on his palm.

This is saddening, because he is a brilliant man, with brilliant talents. He says the world needs more novels about cakes and drinking tea. Well, fair enough. Rather than dwell on my slight sense of disappointment, I prefer to imagine my reader by the Boro, the hippos yawning in the pool below as they wait for the waters of the Okavango to reach them. My reader is oblivious because she is laughing at the goings-on in this strange town called Edinburgh. Laughing and laughing.

Ruaridh Nicoll's latest novel, Wide Eyed is published by Black Swan (£6.99)

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