This cozy mystery follows a group of friends in a retirement community who meet every Thursday to discuss cold cases. However, when a local real estate developer with ties to the retirement home is found dead, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves investigating the murder in real time.
TW/CW: suicide
I believe this is the first book I've read that can be considered a 'cozy' mystery. I tend to veer more into the darker, more broody/hardboiled detective mysteries so this did take some getting used to. As such, I'm not sure I can say if this book is representative of a 'good' cozy mystery but I overall enjoyed it (and the book has a 3.99 average with over 93k ratings on Goodreads so I'd say other people liked it as well). As an American, I know Richard Osman from the many different British comedy panel TV shows he's been on so I was expecting this book to have a certain dry comedy style which it really delivered on. I know that style of dry humor isn't for everyone but I really enjoy it and found it translates well from verbal comedy to the page. I read a lot of British mystery/thrillers but I'd say this one felt the most 'British' of all of them - there were a lot of references to certain stores and people that I think add a real layer of depth to the story.
I found the narrative style to be the most unique aspect of the book. It is told from third-person close POV but we hop around to follow pretty much all of the different characters. I love multi-POV mysteries but usually we only follow two or maybe three different characters. In this case, we hop between all 4 of the main Murder Club members, plus the two police officers, plus a few other side characters. Not only do we hop around all these different characters, but the chapters are incredibly short so the reader is constantly moving around. My hardcover copy is 351 pages and the book has 115 chapters which works out to about 3 pages per chapter and we hop characters almost every chapter change. Also, I've found most multi-POV books will give the characters name at the beginning of the chapter but that isn't the case here. We just pop over to a new character at the beginning of the chapter and Osman just immerses the reader into whatever that character is doing. Thankfully, since the book is in third person, we get the character's name in the first line or two of the chapter but there are times when we get a few lines of description before a name. All that said, we do spend most of the time in Joyce's POV and in her diary entries. The diary entries were another interesting narrative choice that I think did a great job at condensing information to the reader in a very clear way. As I was reading, I felt like these entries were almost like checkpoints in the story to regroup and then we could move forward with the investigation.
As a character-driven reader, I wasn't entirely sure at the beginning how I felt about us hopping around so many different characters. However, once I got settled into the narrative style and all the different characters, I ended up really enjoying the quiet character work that Osman was able to layer into the story. The main group of friends are all in their 70s and they've all led very different lives. When we first meet them, they seem like a pretty unassuming group of people who have their weekly meetings more for socialization than anything else. As the story progresses, we learn more about not only their lives at the retirement community, but also how their earlier life experiences can help them solve the case. It is a pretty straightforward commentary on how society often views the elderly as helpless and, at times, almost infantile. However, they are still people with decades of experiences that shouldn't be discounted just because they're older. As the story goes on, we learn more and more about the Murder Club members which helps deepen their characterization. If this story would have only been following one or two of the characters we could have gotten to know them better but I think the POV hopping we get with this story lets us get to know a lot of different characters and their relationships to each other really well. Also, there's a second book coming out so I'm sure we'll get to know more about them in that book. As as slight downside, it did take a few chapters from each character for me to start to get a good handle on their characterization and I had a bit of a hard time at the beginning keeping everyone straight in my mind. However, I got over this after about the first 25% and it was smooth sailing from that point.
My least favorite part of the story was how all the answers to the different mystery threads were mostly grouped together at the end. I enjoyed the actual solutions, but it really got a little overwhelming and tedious to read "ah ha! here's what happened" over and over and over for the last 15% of the book. I think there were a few of the smaller mysteries that could have worked well as red herrings earlier in the story and then get resolved earlier. I thought the actual solutions to the mysteries were well done and weren't what I was expecting so my issue was more with the pacing than actual substance. Without going into spoilers, I do want to mention that I didn't love the aftermath caused by some of the answers to the mysteries. Most of the book was an overall lighthearted cozy mystery with some spots that got a bit more emotional or sentimental. However, the ending could be considered by some (myself included) to be pretty sad. I can see the logical steps that get us to those sadder details to the ending, but I just didn't love the more than melancholy turn that the end took. I was really expecting there to be more celebration at the solving of the mysteries than there ended up being. I can step back and see the structural elements to the story and I understand why X lead to Y lead to Z but as a reading experience, I just didn't like the tone the book took at the end. The very last chapter does give a slightly uplifting feeling of life continuing on which was nice.
Of course, the key to any good mystery book is the mystery itself. In this story, I thought the mystery elements and subsequent investigations were really well plotted and executed. I liked how the main murder mystery branched off into a few different avenues that we weren't sure until the end if they were or were not related to the main murder. As this is a cozy mystery and not a detective mystery, we are mostly following the Murder Club members as they execute their own investigation. I did like how Osman was able to get around some of the more technical aspects of the investigation with the past life experiences of the Club members and their social connections. It seemed like every time they needed someone to help with X or Y, someone in the Murder Club would have a connection they could get help from. I really enjoyed how we would keep getting new information related to a previous line of inquiry so we kept going back to old leads that had previously been exhausted. It was also interesting how the way the police treated the Murder Club changed as the story progressed. In the beginning, they seemed to view them as a quirky bunch of retirees who basically just had some gossip about the events surrounding the murder. However, as the story progressed and the Murder Club proved to be more capable than originally thought, the police detectives we follow did seem to view them with more respect and were impressed with how they were able to find certain information out. I'm interested to see how the relationship continues to develop in the next book.
Overall, I found this to be a really fun mystery read. I really liked the characters and the unique narrative style. The mystery elements were well plotted however I did find the ending to be a bit jam-packed with all the different resolutions and a bit of a downer.
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