Espresso Tales by Alexander McCall Smith

Another in the line of gossipy portraits of people living in an apartment building in Edinburgh. He’s such an astute observer and has in this one an aggressively trendy mother, who is hothousing her little kid; a smoothly over confident entrepreneurial type, an earth mother anthropologist type and so forth. They were more a series of people portraits, often only tenuously linked, than a novel with a plot, conflict and any kind of resolution. But what characterisation! 2 1/2 stars