Charming quirks of others. Alexander McCall Smith. 2010.

As well as its incomparable advantages, decides Isabel Dalhousie, there are drawbacks to the enlightened village that is twenty-first-century Edinburgh. A village in which every Saturday night  ears burn at dinner parties across the city, and anyone requiring the investigative abilities of a philosophical soul knows just where to find her.

Jillian McKinlay - wife of a trustee of the illustrious Bishop Forbes School - is the latest petitioner; she asks Isabel to look into a poison-pen letter that makes insinuations about applicants for the principal. Then Isabel’s niece ncat has another new boyfriend, hearty Gordon Leafers, a mathematics teacher from Kelso, who seems too good to be true. And when a pretty cellist with a tragic story takes a fancy to her husband-to-be, Isabel finds herself contemplating an act of heroic and alarming self-sacrifice.