Given how popular this book seems to be, I was surprised at how long it took me to warm to it. At times the deliberate simplicity of the writing was engaging and light, but at times it also seemed annoyingly patronising to the characters and their culture. Most of the chapters stand alone as fairly self-contained stories, and the highlights were clever little tales in which someone with a little common sense (usually the lady detective of the title, but not always) proves smarter than some people who society would hold to be their 'better'. But really almost all of the little stories do the same thing, so it gets rather repetitive and the chaff ends up detracting from the wheat.

I think this book could be cut up and 3 or 4 chapters made into lovely short stories for an anthology, but the rest left me rather disappointed.