year to stay in Africa. He joined a community of people who thought they could farm the desert near Molepolole, a city about 50 km from Gaborone. He disappeared ten years before the story begins, and no investigations at the time revealed what happened to him. Dr Oswald Ranta: Professor of economics who lived in the community ten years earlier, and who knew the facts of the fate of Mrs Curtin's son. He is a man with evil in his character, a man of no morals, who is accustomed to ordering people about, mistreating women and lying to manipulate people. Carla Smit: Michael's lover and mother of his son, at the community in the rural area near Molepolole. She took up with Ranta as well. She is an Afrikaans woman from South Africa. After Botswana, she took a job in Bulawayo after leaving Botswana. She has a nine-year-old son. Mr Letsenyane Badule: Owner of his own butcher shop, Honest Deal Butchery, and a man who had risen in another company based on his ability to root out dishonesty and thievery that increased the success of that company. He is married and has a son. His wife is a beautiful woman, dressing in the best of taste. He does not understand how she has the money for her clothes, nor how she found the money to pay for tuition for their son's private schooling. He is very proud of his son. She is not home much. He comes to Mma Ramotswe to learn the truth, as he fears his wife is seeing another man. Rose: Maid to Mma Ramotswe. She is conscientious and reliable, a strong contrast to Florence Peno, the maid the Mr JLB Matekoni. Reviews Publishers Weekly mentioned the book, saying "Alexander McCall Smith (The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) offers the second and third installments of his dignified, humorous Botswanan series. In Tears of the Giraffe, PI Precious Ramotswe tracks a missing American man whose widowed mother appeals to Ramotswe; meanwhile, the imperturbable detective is endangered at home by her fiancé's resentful maid." In a review of a later book in the series, Janet Malcolm mentions an aspect of the author's writing that shows best in this second novel of the series: "McCall Smith follows the satiric literary tradition in which a "primitive" culture is held up to show the laughable backwardness of Western society. . . .