AT THE VILLA OF REDUCED CIRCUM(ISBN=9781400095094)

　　“In the halls of academe, a setting fraught with ego-driven battles for power and prestige [Alexander McCall Smith] has rendered yet another one-of-a-kind character: the bumbling but brilliant Dr. Mortiz-Maria von Igelfeld . . . . [a] deftly rendered trilogy [with] endearingly eccentric characters.” —Chicago Sun-Times

　　Readers who fell in love with Precious Ramotswe, proprietor of The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency, now have new cause for celebration in the protagonist of these three light-footed comic novels by Alexander McCall Smith. Welcome to the insane and rarified world of Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld of the Institute of Romance Philology. Von Igelfeld is engaged in a never-ending quest to win the respect he feels certain he is due–a quest which has the tendency to go hilariously astray.
　　In At the Villa of Reduced Circumstances, Professor Dr. von Igelfeld gets caught up in a nasty case of academic intrigue while on sabbatical at Cambridge. When he returns to Regensburg he is confronted with the thrilling news that someone from a foreign embassy has actually checked his masterwork, Portuguese Irregular Verbs, out of the Institute’s Library. As a result, he gets caught up in intrigue of a different sort on a visit to Bogota, Colombia.

　　Alexander McCall Smith is the author of the international phenomenon The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, and of a new series, The Sunday Philosophy Club. He was born in what is now known as Zimbabwe and was a law professor at the University of Botswana. He lives in Scotland, where he is a professor of medical law at Edinburgh University.