No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency #12! I do feel that this series continues to grow and improve with each one. There is a little repetition, but that's to be expected when you're in a 12-book series! It's not bad, and the characters also continue to grow and deepen.
The Saturday big tent wedding party! Mma Makutsi is finally getting married! I've so been anticipating this. Speaking of character growth, I think Mma Makutsi has shown the most growth. Yes, she can be a bit abrasive or blunt sometimes in her speech, but she shows some restraint sometimes now. For instance, in this book she makes a few concessions when planning the wedding. Mma Makutsi from book #1 would never have done that!
The mystery in this volume is more complex than previous ones, too. Mma Ramotswe can't solve it on intuition and strategic questioning alone. She's hired by a man who has had two cattle mutilated in the middle of the night. Cattle in Botswana are like gold, and this must be put to a stop! But who's doing it? The suspects outnumber the bovine victims.
On top of this big investigation and the planning of the big wedding, Mma Ramotswe also thinks she sees a "ghost"-- the "ghost" of her precious little white van. Is she seeing things?
And finally, Charlie the apprentice gets a little bit of limelight in this book. He is under pressure to wed a girl, because it is suspected that he's the father of her twins. While at first he reacts in a very Charlie-style fashion (runs away), he ends up approaching Mma Ramotswe for help. I do like seeing their interactions! She's kind of a mother figure to him, in a way. I love these slightly wayward apprentices- they're big kids at heart, and Mma Ramotswe and Mr. J.L.B. Matekoni take such good care of them.
I listened to the audiobook version of The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party, and it has the same narrator as the previous eleven books, and she does a fantastic job. I've probably mentioned this in previous reviews of this series, but I'm so glad to have chosen the audiobook versions- I don't know that I would've figured out how to pronounce character and place names on my own! Just one of the many benefits of the audiobooks.
A great series! Not very deep, but not repetitive or boring either. I would hope that you would fall in love with the characters as much as I have.
*I checked out my copy of The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party from my local library.
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