Review: The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman

 

The second novel about the Thursday Murder Club takes on the pure cloak and dagger existence of spies.  Spies past  (Elizabeth) and spies present (her first husband, from her callow youth, named Douglas, a young woman who reminds Elizabeth of herself named Sue, and a lackadaisical spy named Lance).

Everything hinted at in the first novel about Elizabeth is true.  She was an expert, she was legendary.

When her ex-husband from long ago appears in Cooper's Chase and asks for her protection, Elizabeth is reluctant but intrigued.  Naturally she brings the members of the Thursday Murder Club right into the thick of things, because that's what they do.

At the center of the plotting is that Douglas, while engaged in routine spying, stole some diamonds that were just lying on a dining room table. Twenty million dollars worth of diamonds.

Everyone wants the diamonds and Douglas.

 

MI5 isn't prepared for the four brilliant crime solvers.  The mafia and a man who brokers deals aren't able to keep ahead of them. A local drug lord doesn't stand a chance, though she initially seems clever and that she might outwit them.

A young thug who steals Ibrahims phone, knocking him down and kicking him in the head stands no chance at all.

There's definitely the fantasy of bad guys getting their just rewards here.   While you know that rarely happens in the real world, it certainly is good to see it play out as you'd hope with the combined wit and wisdom of the Thursday Murder Club at the helm.

Review: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

 

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.