The premise of Richard Osman's debut novel, The Thursday Murder Club, sounds like quite a fun comical read from the start. The titular club is made up of four retirees - Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim - in a retirement village who spend a couple of hours together a week looking at cold cases and trying to figure out who the uncaught murderer might have been so long ago. So when the murder of a man who helped put their retirement village together ends up murdered, it's quite exciting for them as they get the chance to solve a fresh one, much to the chagrin of the local police, specifically DCI Chris Hudson and PC DeFreitas. Sounds like great fun to read! So I was quite disappointed when I was gripped by the plot or amused by the humour.
The club is made up of a few interesting characters with backgrounds that lend themselves well to their Thursday activities. There is Elizabeth with a very secretive past with hints thrown here and there, she has the strangest connections all over the world in places she's spent time in her life. Sounds a lot like she was a Cold War spy. Her resources are very helpful. Then there's Joyce, a former nurse whose knowledge helps figure out how long it would take for people to die from different types of stab wounds, gunshots and lethal injections. Ron has a wild past of being involved in every protest he could think of and believe in, having been in newspapers as Red Ron and giving back to his community where he could. Then there's the quiet and gentle Ibrahim, a psychiatrist using his skills and knowledge to figure people out. They were all brought together by Penny, a former police officer who provides all the cold cases and is now out of action in a hospital bed waiting to die. They are a great group of characters who are really interesting, genuinely good people who just want to help in ways they know they can.
I think the writing style is the thing that bugged me the most. I generally don't have anything against simply written books, it can make them quite enjoyable to read but the wording here was absolutely juvenile. There's genuinely no skill to it and the sentences don't sound very natural. Whenever any of these characters spoke, it made me think of when I read things I wrote as a 14-year-old - good ideas but awkward and stunted sentences. A lot of it sounded like what I would write trying to think of how adults might speak but it ends up being so proper that it's not natural. There was a lot of forced detail as well that I just thought either wasn't relevant or Osman had no idea of how to weave it in. The humour is quite reminiscent of King of Thieves, the 2018 film about the Hatton Garden Heist, with less of the vulgarity. More of the sweet old pensioner who seems quite innocent but has a few tricks up their sleeve. That was one thing that was done quite well.
The plot was quite standard but not without its own twists and turns. Former drug dealers turned legitimate business men have a disagreement, one wants rid of the other and somehow both end up dead under separate circumstances. But to top it off and make it interesting, amongst all this investigation, another murdered body turns up - but one that's decades old. It was so fun to see both the official members of the Thursday Murder Club put the puzzle pieces together that the unofficial members - the earlier mentioned members of the police department, Chris and Donna - put together as well according to their own resources. If it wasn't for our four retired investigators, the investigation into all three deaths might have taken a lot longer. The back and forth between them was enjoyable, how Elizabeth and Joyce coordinated their first meeting to encourage trust and Chris and Donna quickly realising that if Elizabeth wanted to see them, there were potential updates on the case. There were the usual tense moments between the investigating parties as there always seem to be in crime novels but it quickly passes and there are no consequences for it. The culprit of each crime ended up being a little bit lacklustre. There was a puzzle there to work out, there were missing pieces almost unattainable that made everything fall into place but there was something to me that just seemed too easy about it. By the end, it didn't feel like it was right there in front of you the whole time and you just weren't seeing it because you were looking too hard. It felt like it was pushed to the side, an afterthought put in at the last minute that ended up working out.
Reasons to Recommend:
- Easy read
- Great characters
- If you're a fan of Richard Osman (which is probably what helped this book sell so well in my opinion)
I rated this book a 4/10. I think it just wasn't as good as it could have been. I don't mean it had to be a more complicated or convoluted book, it works with how simplistic it is and makes for an easy read. It just seems like it needs a lot more editing than it got to be the book everyone was probably hoping it would be. To be honest, I don't think I'll find myself interested in reading the sequel any time soon.
Comments
Post a Comment