The Miracle at Speedy Motors begins as Mma Ramotswe’s invaluable but sometimes prickly assistant, Grace Makutsi, opens an unsigned letter. Its message is threatening, and there will be more troubling messages to follow. The agency undertakes the search for the identity of the letter writer, and they also respond to a woman named Mma Sebina, who has written to ask Mma Ramotswe to find a family for her. She has been adopted and has, so far as she knows, no relatives at all. As to personal matters, Grace faces a serious crisis in her engagement when she has to figure out whether to tell her fiancé, Phuti Radiphuti, that the beautiful bed he has just bought, with its red velvet headboard, has been ruined in a rainstorm. The most serious challenge for Mma Ramotswe is that posed by Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni’s decision to take their adopted daughter Motholeli, who is confined to a wheelchair, to South Africa to be seen by a doctor who promises that he can make her walk again. Mma Ramotswe has no faith in this promised miracle—a very expensive one at that—which could bring the family to the brink of economic ruin. Yet how can she handle the situation so as not to destroy her husband’s hope? As always, Mma Ramotswe finds the cleverest, kindest ways to resolve the problems posed by these and other difficulties. In the end she discovers that the biggest miracles in life are often the small ones.
