The volume is the fourth in Alexander McCall Smith's Isabel Dalhousie series. The author also writes three other series, the most well-known of which is "The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency."

The mysteries to be solved here are of a piece with the protagonist's life: They are puzzles having to do with personal morals and professional ethics.

		"The Careful Use of Compliments" By Alexander McCall Smith Pantheon ($21.95)

Isabel is a philosopher, an academic without a university position. Her exercise of the profession comes of her editing a prestigious journal, Review of Applied Ethics. When she gets word that she is being replaced as editor, she tries not to be vengeful. But her constant struggle toward a moral, irreproachable life does not quell her anger.

One of the novel's best moments comes when the man who has supplanted her -- and sneakily so -- makes an appointment to visit her and has the gall to hint that he needs a ride from the train station. She refuses him, only to feel guilty afterward.

Smith makes a compelling narrative of such untidy moments in Isabel's unconventional life. She is a single mother with a young lover, Jamie, who fathered her child.

Jamie has proposed marriage, but Isabel holds off. He was once in love with her niece and may still be.

The plot that criss-crosses Isabel's own moral dilemmas is the story of a painting she wants to buy until she senses something wrong with it. Is it a forgery?

With her own life unresolved and untidy, she pursues (and we do) the story of the painting and its creator who is said to have drowned tragically.