
Hope springs eternal, because the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency series continues to appeal--I just listened to the first one and read the latest one.
So of course I couldn't resist trying the second one in his Professor Dr. Von Igelfeld series, The Finer Points of Sausage Dogs. This one, it turns out, leans more toward slapstick, which McCall Smith doesn't do as well as he does subtle tongue-in-cheek, or maybe I just wasn't in the mood. I confess I didn't finish it, didn't even get past the second disk, as a dachshund's third leg was mistakenly amputated. Quite possibly they were all reattached later, as things tend to work out in McCall Smith's worlds, but I didn't have the stomach to listen to the process.
Instead I switched to a book I read in high school: All the King's Men, by Robert Penn Warren. The narrator of this version (Michael Emerson, Recorded Books) is passable (though I think I'd prefer someone who sounds older and more Southern) and the prose is as rich as I'd remembered it. You can have it after I'm done with it, but only after.