Determined to track down the errant Andrew McNish, Holly returns her wedding ring to the jewellery store where she bought it - Andrew having conveniently left his wallet at home the day they bought the ring - and uses the money to hire O'Brien Investigations to find McNish.
Unfortunately, O'Brien also appears to have taken her money and run, so Holly follows him to rural New South Wales and the Blue Mountains town of Mealey Marshes to demand answers and a refund.
In Mealey Marshes, she finds O'Brien dead in his flat, victim of too much scotch ("He had a heart," Holly is told). Finding his cellphone, Holly answers it and is drawn into investigating McNish's disappearance for the bizarre Una Maggott, whose chauffeur is an Elvis impersonator and whose vehicle is a hearse.
Una thinks McNish is her long-lost half-brother and wants to find him, so who is Holly to refuse, especially when Una gives her a $250 retainer?
Jennifer Rowe throws in a clairvoyant and a couple of other oddballs to complete the cast of Love, Honour and O'Brien, a charmer of a mystery story enhanced by a well-drawn portrait of rural New South Wales.
• The prolific, whimsical and sometimes tiresome Alexander McCall Smith has added a couple more novels to his long list, A Conspiracy of Friends (Polygon) from his Corduroy Mansions series and The Importance of Being Seven (Abacus) from his 44 Scotland Street saga.
Adjacent to fashionable Belgravia, Pimlico has one of London's poshest post-codes, SW1. To rent a one-bedroom flat there can set you back $900 a week or more, while to buy the most basic studio apartment in Pimlico will cost more than $300,000.
In that environment, the presence of a crumbling block of flats, Corduroy Mansions, seems exceedingly unlikely and the relatively modest rents residents allude to an anachronism.
In A Conspiracy of Friends, the third volume in his Corduroy Mansions series, Smith's odd cast of characters behave even more strangely than in the previous books and the only one this reader finds appealing is Freddie de la Hay, the Pimlico terrier.
Although set in Edinburgh and its surrounds, The Importance of Being Seven has a similar confetti style: scatter characters through the pages in a series of vignettes and call the result a novel. Again, only one really appeals, Bertie Pollock, the almost-seven-year-old of the title.
The others - as in the Corduroy Mansions books - are either too good, or too bad, to be true. That may be the secret of Smith's success but it can become tiresome, and one longs to find the vestige of a plot somewhere, anywhere, in his books.
• Gillian Vine is a Dunedin writer.
