“It’s been a quiet year for the Thursday Murder Club. Joyce is busy with table plans and first dances. Elizabeth is grieving. Ron is dealing with family troubles, and Ibrahim is still providing therapy to his favorite criminal. But when Elizabeth meets a wedding guest who’s in trouble, kidnap and death are hot on their heels once more. A villain wants access to an uncrackable code, and will stop at nothing to get it. Plunged back into action once more, can the gang solve the puzzle and a murder in time?”
It seems while writer Richard Osman was off starting a new series, some significant time has passed in Cooper’s Chase as well. Elisabeth is in deep mourning due to the passing of her husband, while Ron has seen his two children’s lives, along with his grandson, getting worse.
But then there is Joyce and seeing to her daughter Joanna’s marriage to Paul. It is during the reception that Elisabeth meets a man named Nick Silver who believes someone wants him, and a woman named Holly Lewis, dead. The two are business partners who years earlier were paid to do a job (they being in the business of “cold storage” – essentially hiding things people don’t want other people to know) in Bitcoin. As risk takers –they acquired it from a drug dealer- they took a wait and see attitude with whether it would lose money or profit from it down the line. Eventually, as we all know by now, Bitcoin has become very valuable. Now they have a quarter of a billion pounds and want to cash it in. But trust among thieves is never a best bet. And this Impossible Fortune leads to much mayhem.
The fifth Thursday Murder Club is crackling good and it’s clear that Osman is opening the series a bit more, making it less cozy whodunit in a small village in the English countryside and adding more layers (again, I think the characters of this series will eventually crossover into the We Solve Crime folks). There is added layer of poignancy here, with Elisabeth deep in grief over the loss of Stephen – so much to the point she has lost some interest with her club. The mother/daughter relationship shines brightly here, because while Joanna has had a recurring role in the previous four books, here she gets to shine and is more center to plot (meanwhile, Donna, Chris, and Bogdan take a back-step here). And like all familial relationships, Joyce and Joanna have their difficulties. It’s fairly realistic, I think. Another sub-plot involves why Ron’s son Jason has been taking care of his nephew and what has happened to his daughter Suzi (something that has been on the back-burner for a while in this series).
The return of Connie –who remains not my favorite character- mentoring 18-year-old Tia in the ways of being a crime lord turns out to be surprising, as Ibrahim’s mentoring has seemly made Connie more human (but once a criminal, always a criminal?).
The humor remains, though less laugh out loud than before. And Osman, wisely, has opened the premise of the series, which reassures a few more books, but the characters continue to develop nicely.
Also, while I enjoyed Netflix’s adaptation of the first books a few weeks back, I was not happy with changes made, especially who the killer was. At this point, I’m unsure they’ll be following up with a sequel, partly because of the changes and ages of the cast have to be considered. It’s clear that Osman was writing this book during the movies production, because there is a funny in-joke involving Ron and Ibrahim talking about their favorite James Bond – with Ron choosing Pierce Brosnan.
It’s a fun ride.
No comments:
Post a Comment