Following on from the brilliant The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Tears of the Giraffe charts the further adventures of Precious Ramotswe, Botswana's onlyand finest - female private detective.It's going to take all her intuition and eminent sensibility for Precious to crack her hardest case yet:the decade-old disappearance of an American on the edge of the Kalahari. And if that wasn't enough, there are plenty of matters closer to home to concern her:her highly talented secretary, Mma Makutsi, eager to be promoted to detective; the unscrupulous maid of her husband-to-be, the wonderful Mr J. L. B. Matekoni;and the sudden - and unexpected - increase in her family by not one, but two.

Alexander McCall Smith was born in Zimbabwe and educated there and in Scotland. He is Professor of Medical Law at the University of Edinburgh and is a member of a number ofnational and international bodies concerned with bioethics. His books include works on medical law, criminal law and philosophy, as well as numerous books for children, collections of short stories, and novels. He has lectured at various universities in Africa, including in Botswana, where he lived for a time. He is married to an Edinburgh doctor, and has two daughters."The author"s prose has the merits of simplicity, euphony and precision.His descriptions leave one as if standing in the Botswanan landscape.