"Exquisitely crafted, richly imagined, and as funny as it is moving, Hourglass is an unusual and uniquely told love story. Turning time upside down, it combs the wreckage of personal heartbreak for something universal and asks what it means to lose what you love."--

From internationally best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith, creator of The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, comes a new mystery series brimming with the same wit and charm. Isabel Dalhousie is a philosopher by training, and an amateur sleuth by choice. When a young man falls from a balcony to his death, Isabel does not believe it was an accident. Plunging deep into the shady business community of Edinburgh, she is determined to root out the truth....

"A power ballad to female friendship, Girls They Write Songs About is a thrumming, searching novel about bonds that shape us more than any love affair"-- New York, 1997. As the city's gritty edges are being smoothed into something safer and shinier, two girls meet at a music magazine. Rose--brash and self-possessed--is a staff writer. Charlotte--hesitant, bookish-- is an editor. First wary, then slowly admiring, they recognize in each other an insatiable...

When friends from Dallas arrive in Edinburgh and introduce Isabel to Tom Bruce, a bigwig at home in Texas, several confounding situations unfurl at once. Tom's young fiancée's roving eye leads Isabel to believe that money may be the root of her love for Tom. But what, Isabel wonders, is the root of the interest Tom begins to show for Isabel herself? And she can't forget about her niece, Cat, who's busy falling for a man whom Isabel suspects of being...

For Piglet - an unshakable childhood nickname - getting married is her opportunity to reinvent. Together, Kit and Piglet are the picture of domestic bliss - effortless hosts, planning a covetable wedding ... But if a life looks too good to be true, it probably is. Thirteen days before they are due to be married, Kit reveals an awful truth, cracking the facade Piglet has created. It has the power to strip her of the life she has so carefully built,...