"Four septuagenarians with a
few tricks up their sleeves; A female cop with her first big case; A brutal
murder; Welcome to…The Thursday Murder Club.
'In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet weekly in the Jigsaw Room to discuss unsolved crimes; together they call themselves The Thursday Murder Club. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.
'When a local developer is found dead with a mysterious photograph left next to the body, the Thursday Murder Club suddenly find themselves in the middle of their first live case. As the bodies begin to pile up, can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer, before it’s too late?”
The British are very good at
creating wonderful whodunits. And The Thursday Murder Club is your traditional
murder mystery, taking place in a small, obscure village where everyone has
secrets and everyone has a motive for murder. But Coopers Chase in Kent is also
filled with more quirky senior citizens than you shake a stick at. There is
Joyce, a former nurse, Ron, a former trade unionist, Ibrahim, a former
psychiatrist, and Elizabeth, who leads The Thursday Murder Club, and who is
former intelligence agent, with has many connections and many favors to be
called in when needed. She is also a hoot (Joyce is as well, especially in her
diary entries, where you see she’s the quite one of the group, but she still
sees everything). Added to the mix is PC Donna de Freitas,
a recent transplant from the London Met, and her boss DCI Chris Hudson.
This debut novel from Richard Osman, a British humorist, producer, television presenter, writer, and creator of the BBC One quiz show Pointless, is a wonderfully enjoyable tale that features a group of four senior citizens who seemly have a penchant for solving cold case crimes and, now, a real murder. The prose is deft, and there are plenty of laugh out moments in the book. There is some twists and turns, per the genre, but also too many characters and storylines that seemed unnecessary. Also, while the core four (and somewhat, Donna & Chris) were fun, the actual crime of the murder (and murders) got confusing and caused me to sort of wonder why Osman diverged so much from the format. It got so much that in the end, I was bored with who the killer was –which is unfortunate, considering whodunits are about who did the deed and why. I also felt that Ibrahim, the former psychiatrist, who is also Egyptian, comes across more for diversity (one failure of the classic British mystery drama is that it’s pretty much white) sake and comes across as a cipher here. Maybe in the next two books, Osman will give him more to do and be more central to those books plots.
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