In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders.

But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case.

Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.

Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it’s too late?

My thanks to Chloe at Penguin Random House for the opportunity to listen to The Thursday Murder Club audiobook ahead of the publication date.

After a summer of COVID related publication delays this week saw a tsunami of new titles heading our way. Many debut authors will get lost in the flurry but as one of the most familiar faces on our telly boxes I doubt that will apply to Richard Osman. Indeed a quick glance at the Amazon charts shows that The Thursday Murder Club is sitting in the top ten Mystery titles.  But here’s the thing – this is a good book and irrespective of how well known the author may be a good story shines through and The Thursday Murder Club definately shines.

I was invited to join the blog tour for the audiobook of The Thursday Murder Club so the past two weeks I have spent my time in the company of Joyce, Elizabeth, Ibrahim and Ron; four residents of a retirement village in once of the nicer areas in Southern England.  Much of the story is seen through the eyes of Joyce (as relayed to her diary) however narrative does change viewpoints and we get a good opportunity to view many different events and discussions as the story unfolds.  This is extremely helpful as there is a lot going on down in Coopers Chase village where our amatur sleuths reside.

For clarity, the Thursday Murder Club are not a gang of aged killers biding their time to pick off the next victim.   Elizabeth is good friends with a former police inspector who now finds herself hospitalized and seemingly receiving end of life care.  The police officer and Elizabeth (along with Ron and Ibrahim) would review old case files and try to find clues which the investigating teams may have missed many years before.  Their endeavours are keeping their minds active and deep down Elizabeth knows there is little hope of actually catching a killer.  At the start of the story we see Joyce (former nurse) being consulted by Elizabeth on the liklihood of a stabbing victim dying within a certain timeframe.  Having considered the extent of the wounds – Elizabeth has crime scene photographs for reference – Joyce is able to surmise there was time between stabbing and death for the victim to have received medical assistance which would surely have saved her life.  Elizabeth concurred and Joyce appears to have passed the “entry exam” and is invited to join the Thursday Murder Club.   Thus Joyce and the reader become members of Elizabeth’s core circle.

Archive files are all well and good but when an actual (brutal) murder takes place and the members of the Thursday Murder Club knew the victim, the old cases are promptly forgotten as there is a killer to be found. Using their combined skills Elizabeth, Ron, Joyce and Ibrahim manage to befriend the local community police officer, get her brought into the team investigating the murder and then work their charms on her boss to facilitate an exhange of information to ensure they are kept up to date on the progress of the police investigation.

If that sounds whimiscal and unlikely then you may well be right but it is fun and that’s what’s really important here.  Richard Osman has crafted a light hearted, funny and engaging story. It is cozy crime but with an unexpectedly large death count by the end of the story and there are so many charming, tender and emotive moments in the book that you can find yourself laughing one paragraph only to have a casual throwaway line in the next bringing a tear-prick to your eyes.  Joyce’s Jersey Boys story nearly did for me.

The hook in this story is not the murder or even the investigation. It is very much the characters – the four Club members, Donna and Chris the two police officers investigating the murder, the gangsters who knew the victim (he was one of them) and the dozens of supporting characters that come and go as life goes on around the Coopers Chase retirment village.  If you enjoy larger than life characters wonderfully realised on page then Richard Osman is your current go-to book of choice…he nails it.

I do need to point out that it took me a while to embrace this story.  The narrative style is very conversational and that took me some time to get my head around. Characters have conversations with lots of tangents, drifting off point to discuss the daughter of the person they met and oh she had a new car and her husband is not the nicest chap in town.  It is a frighteningly realistic portrayal of group discussions in a retirement home and adds so much more insight into how the characters are thinking but when I was reading I was initially horrified about having to listen to all the ramblings.  But the ramblings are sometimes important, they are often emotive or funny and they can lead to some unexpected outcomes.  I am more accustomed to dark and edgy crime thrillers so the mental shift to cosy, chatty was needed.  I think I was around 90 mins into the audiobook (over 10 hours in length) before I embraced it fully.  And I am glad I did.

The all important information you need to know about the audiobook is how does the narration sound?  Leading us through this story is Lesley Manville – she was a great choice and made Joyce, Elizabeth and the others really come to life for me.  She has, what I consider to be, a posh English accent which I associate with tea with the vicar, the chair of the local WI branch and someone who uses the word “frightful” in every day conversation.  Not much like the voices I hear in my neighbourhood on the edge of Glasgow! But it works perfectly for The Thursday Murder Club and that’s the key.

Not my usual listen as I tend not to enjoy the cosy crime stories but The Thursday Murder Club had so much going on and was written with buckets of charm and clever, clever red herrings I could not help but love it. Not too shabby at all – good job Mr Osman!

The Thursday Murder Club is available in hardback, digital and (obviously) audiobook format.  You can order a copy here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07S5D5TH7/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_bibl_vppi_i0