Isabel Dalhousie: "The Right Attitude to Rain" Quiz

Answer: Texas

Isabel's cousin, Mimi, and Mimi's husband, Joe, had come for a month-long visit from Dallas, Texas. During that time, they all were invited to a house party at a manor rented by another couple from Dallas, who turned out to be the couple that Isabel had noticed at an art gallery. They had caught her attention because they had parked in a no-parking zone.

Answer: Bell's palsy

Isabel first noticed Tom Bruce and his fiancée Angie at an art gallery, and she remembered him because his face was distorted from Bell's palsy, a facial paralysis due to nerve damage. When Mimi had mentioned a house party to be given by a friend who suffered from Bell's palsy, Isabel immediately knew who it was.

Answer: A flat/apartment

Grace had worked for Isabel's father, and he had asked Isabel to look after Grace. Grace was renting her flat/apartment, which Isabel thought was impractical, and since Grace didn't want to take on debt, Isabel decided to buy one for her. When Grace told Isabel she wanted to pay rent, Isabel said that she would accept it in peppercorns.

Answer: A mama's boy

Cat brought her latest boyfriend, Patrick, to meet Isabel while Mimi and Joe were staying at Isabel's house. Isabel thought that he was an improvement over Cat's last boyfriend, but she still wasn't sure about him. When discussing him with Mimi, Mimi said he was a "mama's boy", which Isabel later found out was true.

His mother was a "powerful, rather hectoring woman" with whom Isabel had served on a committee, and she tried to pressure Isabel into breaking up the relationship between Cat and Patrick because she thought Patrick was too busy for it.

When he did break off the relationship, that was the reason that Patrick gave Cat.

Answer: Isabel had recommended her.

Isabel had met Miranda at Peter Stevenson's party, and she had impulsively offered to help Miranda find work. Cat had mentioned to Isabel that she needed summer help, so Isabel recommended Miranda, although she really knew nothing about her. Miranda turned out to have a positive impact on Eddie, which pleased Isabel.

Answer: "My God! What a massive rump!"

After Isabel had decided to have an affair with Jamie, she wanted to tell a stranger about it, but then she remembered a conversation she had had with a psychiatrist friend on the topic of acting on impulses. He had told a story about a very respectable professor who was at a party and saw the "rather substantial" wife of another professor and blurted out the first thing that popped in his mind.

Answer: She had had an affair.

Isabel had always referred to her Alabaman mother as her "sainted American mother", and she was somewhat distraught to discover that her mother had had an affair while married to her father. Her mother had died when Isabel was young, so she had asked Mimi for information about her. Mimi told her that the man was much younger than her mother and that he had broken off the relationship when he found out that she was ill.

Answer: He wanted to tear it down.

One of the main criticisms of this book from readers was that there wasn't any mystery, but there actually was, although it wasn't the focal point of the story as had been the case in the earlier books. The mystery here focused on Tom Bruce and his fiancée, Angie. Mimi and Isabel both thought Angie was marrying Tom for his money, and when Tom confided to Isabel that he wasn't happy with the engagement and was in fact scared of her, Isabel advised him to "buy Angie off". But when Angie told Mimi that she had broken up with Tom, Angie told the opposite story - she was scared of Tom, and she was shocked by his offer of money and turned him down. So there was a mystery as to the truth about the relationship.

Later, when Mimi told Isabel that Tom's place had burned down, the mystery concerned who torched it. Isabel and Mimi immediately thought it was Angie, but then Isabel had doubts. As Mimi pointed out, fires could be set by the owners themselves, which triggered a memory of a conversation that Isabel had with Tom, but she couldn't remember the details. The only thing that popped into her head was a child's rhyme ending with the word "liar!" The actual conversation dealt with the fact that Tom didn't like where the house was located on the property, but he couldn't tear it down because he jointly owned it with his sister, and his sister's husband wouldn't allow him to do so. So did he torch it himself so that he could rebuild the house where he wanted?

Answer: She was pregnant.

Jamie had gone to Glasgow for a workshop and wanted to stay a couple of days longer to see some friends, but Isabel asked him to come back early. She gave him a glass of wine while she uncharacteristically had ginger ale, and when he asked why, she said "because I'm pregnant". He dropped the glass.

Answer: Brother Fox ate it.

When Cat had found out about Isabel and Jamie's relationship, she was furious with Isabel. Isabel originally wrote a note of apology to take to Cat, but after speaking with Eddie, she tore up the note, having decided that it was Cat who owed the apology. Cat had broken off her relationship with Jamie, so he was available, and Cat didn't have the right to keep a hold on him. Eddie said that he told her this, and she gradually came around to accept that this was true.

She left a box of cheese and sausage on Isabel's front doorstep, but Brother Fox got to it before Isabel.