The Careful Use of Compliments
Alexander McCall Smith
 After her son, Charlie's birth, Isabel feels that her life has hit a happy (or happier) patch. Deciding that she may bid for a painting at auction, she visits the showroom, where she has arranged to meet Jamie (her son's father). Jamie proposes but Isabel says that she thinks they should wait, half-hoping that Jamie will press his case. She is a little disappointed when he agrees with her, but accepts that they have made the correct decision. To her distress, she learns that the editorial board of the Review of Applied Ethics, which she edits, has decided to replace her, an action that she effectively reverses although not without her usual philosophical qualms and musings. Meanwhile, she becomes interested in the life and recent death of Andrew McInnes, an artist most of whose paintings feature the island of Jura and who was lost in a boating accident there some years previously. Travelling with her fiancée, Jamie, and Charlie to the place of his loss she discovers new information about a more recent painter who was painting similar scenes. Her investigations into a possible art fraud unearth something quite unexpected.