story opens about a month after the close of the prior novel, Tears of the Giraffe. The characters have aged and developed since the first novel, and more cases are brought to the No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency to be solved in each novel. This novel has a balance between two cases and the personal lives of the main characters. There is a theme of morality, as Mma Ramotswe and Mma Makutsi each spend time reflecting on moral behavior in the new nation, the differences in how men and women are treated, their strength from the old Setswana morality, and how people in the country change to meet the new situations of Botswana. Publication history Per Kirkus Reviews, the early novels in this series had their American publication later than in Scotland, part of the UK, which published the first in 1998, the second in 2000, and the third, Morality for Beautiful Girls, in 2001. The first three novels appeared in 2002 in the USA. In their review of the first novel in the series, Kirkus Reviews notes that "The first American publication of this 1999 debut has been preceded by two special Booker citations and two sequels, Tears of the Giraffe (2000) and Morality for Beautiful Girls (2001), both forthcoming in the series." In reviewing the fifth novel in the series, Marcel Berlins describes the pathway of the growing audience, requiring one to understand that although Scotland and England are part of the same nation, the residents are not reading the same books at the same time. There was an interesting pathway for knowledge and appreciation of the series by McCall Smith, a Scot, featuring Precious Ramotswe, the female detective in Botswana, to reach England. Marcel Berlins notes in his review of The Full Cupboard of Life that it is the fifth in a series, but the first to be readily available in England, via the success of the series in America. "This novel by an eminent Scottish law professor about a woman detective in Botswana is the fifth in a series, the other four having largely escaped English attention (and availability). The Scots have had better luck: they've known about McCall Smith for several years, but it has taken his extraordinary and unexpected success in the US for word to have filtered back to England that he's a treasure of a writer whose books deserve immediate devouring." In