The Dog Who Came in from the Cold: A Corduroy Mansions Novel

Corduroy Mansions is a fun, rewarding story--humorous, but not laugh-out-loud funny. It's comfort food in literary form. We look forward to every book in every one of his Alexander McCall Smith's series, but this series, his newest, is one of our favorites. Set in an apartment house in London, it's a contemporary soap opera with a low level of angst and a high level of pleasant personal intrigue. Life feels kinder and gentler for the hours spent with Corduroy Mansions. Could listen to Simon Prebble all day--soothing and skillful reader.

Yes. Wonderful characters and lots of fun to listen to.

The eccentric characters that McCall Smith creates.

All of the scenes with Berthea and her brother, Terrance.

Tinker, Tailor, Sailor...Dog.

Alexander McCall Smith is such a prolific writer that it might be feared that some of his series would suffer. No worries! The wonderfully eccentric characters and delightful details of their quirky lives remain alive and well in all of his many books!

Picked up right where the other book left off without too much repetition about what happened in the last adventure.

His fabulous accent!

No, its easy light listening that I enjoy but don't feel compelled to stay up all night to read.

If you like the different Alexander McCall Smith series you will like this one too. I keep expecting them to run into Bertie.

I enjoyed the dog.

Again, I loved the dog.

Nothing.

How the dog won everyone over.

I would like to have seen the dog have a more active role.

I wrote that the first book in this series was "just ok", but 6 months later, I found a had a hankering to read another. The characters continued to grow on me after I finished the book. Now I've read the second, and I am somewhat more enthusiastic. Still not anything compelling and irresistible, and still nowhere near as good as the Ladies' Number One Detective Agency series, in my view, but I did enjoy this book.

Like the Ladies' No. 1 series, these stories are gentle, not terribly fast-moving or full of action. Much of the book consists of the internal thoughts of the characters, some of them rambling and tangential to whatever led to them. The characters are all likeable. and some of them are real "characters"! Some of the action and dialog is kind of goofy, but meant to be, and amusing, in a gentle sort of way (not knee-slapping hilarity, but pleasantly amusing). There are many different characters, whose lives intertwine only superficially (most of them are neighbors to each other), and the book is told in an ever-rotating series of episodes in each of the main character's lives.

I found that some of the character-plot-lines worked better than others, and were of more interest to me. Some of it is kind of ho-hum, but all in all, I just LIKE being with these characters - they are all like real people who have (mild) real-world problems (although the stuff about William and his dog getting mixed up with spies is not terribly realistic) that real people can relate to.

Yes. It's a gentle story, yet keeps one's interest.

How William's neighbor finally found Freddie de la Hay.

William. He's a good person.

Freddie, because the author does a dog's point of view very well.

Funny, touching, exciting even. A not so shaggy dog satire (albeit a fond satire) of the British spy genre. Superb narration by Simon Prebble whose voice conveys just the right humorous note when called for. Prebble is a master with accents as well, a much needed skill to carry off this brilliantly written work.