★★★★☆ - Four Stars
I was ridiculously late to The Thursday Murder Club.
It seemed as though everyone had read it before I finally picked it up, and by then I had heard so much about Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron that I half expected them to be waiting impatiently for me at Coopers Chase.
The premise is brilliant. Four friends in a retirement village meet every Thursday to look through old murder cases and see whether they can work out what really happened. It is mostly an intellectual exercise until an actual murder occurs rather too close to home, at which point the Thursday Murder Club suddenly has a real investigation to get its teeth into.
I expected a cosy murder mystery.
What I hadn't expected was to become so fond of everyone.
Joyce was probably my favourite. Her diary entries are wonderful because she can wander from murder to cake without apparently seeing anything strange about it. There is something delightfully ordinary about her, and yet she's much more observant than people give her credit for.
Elizabeth, meanwhile, is anything but ordinary. She clearly has quite a history behind her, knows how to get information when she wants it and seems to regard rules as things that apply mainly to other people. Ibrahim is thoughtful and methodical, while Ron is considerably more likely to charge straight into a situation and worry about the consequences afterwards.
Together they are tremendous fun.
One of the things I liked most was that Osman doesn't treat his older characters as sweet little pensioners who have somehow stumbled into solving a crime. They are intelligent, complicated people with decades of experience behind them. They have careers, marriages, mistakes, secrets, grief and friendships in their pasts. That emphasis on character, humour and warmth alongside the mystery is something that comes up repeatedly in responses to the novel.
And they are perfectly capable of running rings around considerably younger people.
The mystery itself kept me guessing, although I did occasionally think there was a little too much going on. There are plenty of characters to remember, several threads to follow and moments when I had to stop and remind myself who somebody was. Judging by the range of reader reactions, I'm certainly not alone in finding the book a little busier than expected, although the characters and humour are what seem to win most readers over.
For me, they did too.
What really surprised me was the sadness running quietly underneath all the fun. Coopers Chase is full of people approaching the later years of their lives, and Osman doesn't pretend otherwise. There are moments concerning ageing, loss, illness and loving someone when time is no longer something you can take for granted.
It gives the book considerably more heart than I was expecting.
I laughed quite a lot, became far too invested in the residents' lives and reached the final pages feeling rather pleased that this wasn't a standalone novel.
Is it the most fiendishly complicated murder mystery I've ever read? Probably not.
Did I thoroughly enjoy spending time with these four interfering amateur detectives?
Absolutely.
And if I ever end up living in a retirement village, I now have very specific requirements concerning its extracurricular activities.
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