Review: The Thursday Murder Club

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Picture the scene, an expensive retirement village in Kent (think pilates, Zumba, a gym, a swimming pool and cafe), called Cooper's Chase Retirement Village, built on the site of a former convent and four retirees meet every Thursday to try to solve old murder cases.

Then the retirement village's shady owner Ian Ventham decides he wants to expand by digging up the nun's graveyard and cutting out his builder and minority partner Tony Curran, the retirees are up in arms and Tony Curran is found bludgeoned to death in his own home. Soon there is an embarrassment of murders, old and new, for the club to solve, working alongside local detective DCI Chris Hudson and PC Donna de Freitas. There are red herrings galore and it is all set in my corner of the world (I don't know why it gives me a thrill when characters are on a train that stops in my home town of Orpington, but it does). Think Miss Marple but with an iPad and brought right up to date with modern concerns. It had a plethora of engaging characters, all with interesting backstories.

I had two niggles with this book. First, Richard Osman writes in the present tense a lot and it can be difficult to determine whether one of the characters is speaking/writing or whether the author is speaking directly to the reader, then he mixes his tenses, like this:

Ron had come to her with the photograph that Karen Playfair had seen. Karen would have been young at the time, but she was sure. Elizabeth had tried to piece it all together in her head. It seemed impossible at first. But the more she thought about it, it began to seem horribly true. She worked out the steps, one by one. Ibrahim had come back an hour ago, with the final piece of the jigsaw, so now is the time. The case is solved and only justice remains.

I could follow it but the changing tenses pulled me out of the story to be honest.
My second niggle may merely be a formatting issue with my ARC, scenes changed and the character changed within the same paragraph with no warning. One minute Elizabeth and Ron were talking in the Jigsaw Room and the next sentence features Chris and Donna watching TV and can take a sentence or two before you realise the change. Now, as I say this could be formatting of my ARC, I seemed to lose the chapter numbers partway through the book so it could be that the final version doesn't have this issue.

Overall, loved this quirky gang of octogenarian sleuths, able to find out what the police cannot (just like Miss Marple) and would love to read another one.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley in return for an honest review.

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