Sometimes when you really like a book, it's hard to write about it. That's the case here, or I would have had this written this morning.
I bought The Thursday Murder Club when it came out, based on reviews. I took a peek at it, but it wasn't what I was in the mood for at the time. I also had read reviews, and somehow thought it might be a cutesy look at funny old people who totter around talking about crimes and mysteries. Somehow the thought of it being vaguely like the movie Cocoon entered my mind. I thought Cocoon was a depressing movie.
The Thursday Murder Club consists of four individuals who happen to be in their seventies and eighties. They live in a retirement village in the English countryside with lovely views, plenty to do, and the wine flows freely.
They meet Thursdays and go over the case files of a former member, trying to solve some of the unsolved cases. Joyce was a nurse for forty years. Ron was a bit of a rowdy labor organizer. Ibrahim was a psychiatrist. Elizabeth appears to have been a government operative, likely working for MI5.
When murder comes to the community they live in, they perk right up and prepare to dig in and find out who the murderer is. The expertise and friends and acquaintances of this group is a force to be reckoned with. Kindly, they take two local police detectives under their wing.
The murders begin when the developer of their community decides to expand. He owns the land upon which a cemetery for the nuns who lived where Cooper's Chase now stands are buried. He plans to remove all of the bodies (carefully, he says publicly) and create a new community there. This is a case of literally knowing where the bodies are buried, as all sorts of things from the past, not just nuns, are in that graveyard.
The daily lives and concerns of these folks and others in the community are just tossed in. However, if you are getting up there yourself, or know someone who is, the story can hit hard. Losing someone slowly to dementia. Secrets that come out when time runs out. People who are lonely wondering how they ended up this way. That awful time when someone you love isn't communicative any longer and you talk to them and don't know if they hear or understand you at all, but you try because it keeps them with you somehow.
The backstory of one of the suspects just made me cry. Maybe all of the other stuff softened me up.
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