The Last Devil To Die: The Thursday Murder Club 4

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Is being a spy always this boring?’ he asks Elizabeth. She has been unusually quiet today. ‘It’s 90 per cent this, 5 per cent paperwork and 5 per cent killing people,’ says Elizabeth. That’s the thing about Coopers Chase. You’d imagine it was quiet and sedate, like a village pond on a summer’s day. But in truth it never stops moving, it’s always in motion. And that motion is aging, and death, and love, and grief, and final snatched moments and opportunities grasped. The urgency of old age. There’s nothing that makes you feel more alive than the certainty of death.” The mysteries are complex, the characters vivid, and the whole thing is laced with warm humor and—remarkably, considering the body count—good feeling. Your next must-read mystery series.” Eve: How the Female Body Drove 200 Million Years of Human Evolution (Hutchinson Heinemann, Oct) by Cat Bohannon

To Osman, though, crime fiction is doing “insanely well” at present. “I think that a rising tide raises all ships. The more I sell, the more crime fiction sells, is the truth,” he says, when I ask how it felt as a fledgling author to give writers like Lee Child, whom he’d presumably hero-worshipped as a crime fan, a run for their money. There have been plenty of books written about Britney Spears, including Heart to Heart, which the singer co-wrote with her mother in 2000. But her autobiography The Woman in Me (Gallery, Oct) promises a new level of candour as it covers not just her childhood and early years of fame but the controversial conservatorship that placed her father in control of her medical and financial affairs in 2008, and which was terminated after a sensational court hearing two years ago. As I wrote I realized what a fascinating time being in your 70s is, because you’ve probably had the most experience you’re ever going to have Richard Osman has been an extremely productive and creative author for the past few years, so much so that there now seems to be a plethora of writers who try and duplicate his formula. Once again, Osman proves he is at the top of his game as he treats us to his usual assortment of seniors who assist the police in solving crimes. Elizabeth is the leader, Joyce her friend and diarist, Ron the former union leader and Ibrahim who is a psychogist. Here we have one of their friends, an antique dealer, who is murdered after he is given an old box filled with heroin. The dealer is dead, and the box with the heroin is missing. They care less about the heroin, but need to discover who killed their friend. We also are treated to a side issue of Romance Fraud on the internet as a new resident at their apartments has fallen for an internet romance and shipped a large amount of funds to Lithuania to help his "true love" pay her bills. Add to this, Elizabeth's husband Stephen is suffering from dementia and we have many segments of the book dealing with the condition, aging, death, etc. Finally we also have University professors, Afghan drug smugglers, a cocaine dealer who Ibrahim counsels at her prison cell, and a rival antique dealer and her male Canadian partner. I am telling you, the plot is interesting, we get to also meet Bob the Computer Guy who also has just moved into the complex, and we are treated to Joyce with her diary entries which also help tie things together, and who has surprisingly taken the lead when Elizabeth is indisposed.Head through Lents Hill, past the Blue Dragon and the little farm shop with the big egg outside, until you reach the small stone bridge over the Robertsmere.

The Bullet That Missed hits on every front. Its quandaries stymie, its solutions thrill, its banter is worth reciting and its characters exemplify an admirable camaraderie. One can only hope that the Thursday Murder Club’s next outing appears before long.” There may be other aged detectives in print and on television,but for wit, intelligence and humanity, the Thursday Murder Club outranks them all.” Anyway my point is four books in and Richard Osman has the goddamn audacity to keep handing me not just consistently good but consistently BETTER goddamn books each and every goddamn time. No matter how good he was at coming up with hit TV formats, Osman insists he approached his books without cynicism. “You cannot second guess the public. You instantly see it when people try to,” he says, though admits he is “blessed with quite a mainstream sensibility”. He laughs. “I don’t have a particularly dark, obscurist side.”What is truly special in the books are the characters, whose age allows for a beautiful kind of interaction… For all the fizz of jokes and romance, the books carry with them a sense of grief and sadness which becomes much stronger in The Last Devil to Die…The kindness is his books comes out of something greater for Osman. It’s how he wants the world to be and it’s how he thinks the world is, if only we could realize it.” Last week, Sally Rooney’s third novel Beautiful World, Where Are You topped the UK’s charts with sales of 46,065 copies. This week, Rooney’s novel sits at No 4 in the overall charts, with 19,782 copies sold. Bob Mortimer’s And Away… sits behind Osman in second place, having sold 42,094 copies. Samantha Harvey is a beautiful stylist; in Orbital (Cape, Nov) a group of astronauts look down on our fragile Earth. It’s a slim, profound study of intimate human fears set against epic vistas of swirling weather patterns and rolling continents. Members of the group often visit the nearby (and fictional) seaside town of Fairhaven. Based on descriptions in the book, the town might be loosely based on the real life Hastings in East Sussex. It's described as being “around 30 minutes in the other direction from Tunbridge Wells” and having a police station, pier, and access to the A21 for entering/exiting the town. Nielsen Book Research’s Philip Stone said that Osman was a “publishing phenomenon”. “In recent memory we’ve seen hugely successful titles inspire long-term trends within crime fiction – Stieg Larsson’s success leading to a boost for Nordic noir, Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train stimulating the market for psychological thrillers,” said Stone. “It will be interesting to see whether Osman’s success leads to a glut of cosy crime caper publishing.”

Trouble is becoming a habit for the members of the Thursday Murder Club. They find themselves hot on the trail of two murders that took place ten years apart – and Elizabeth is assigned a deadly mission. Kill, or be killed. While previous books in the Thursday Murder Club series have been full of action and crowded with characters, it becomes noticeably apparent early on that this book feels different with its quieter, softer tone, fewer characters, and an unexpected emotional punch. With that said, it's a topic that's handled in a most thoughtful and compassionate way by the author. Richard Osman has long been a household name in the UK, but it's only recently that he's become more well-known outside the UK (with people who aren't already Anglophiles or British TV fans, of course). In 2020, he published the first book in his Thursday Murder Club series, and it was an instant hit. This was an entertaining mystery, with more chaos and mayhem (hehe) than you'd expect old people to get themselves into. We see Joyce really come into her own here, stepping in for Elizabeth who is otherwise indisposed. I feel like all the side characters were particularly charming, and I even started to like Connie if you can believe it. We also have a little side mystery going on to catch an online scammer, just to add a bit of extra zing to the whole thing. Bogdan Jankowsi– A Polish immigrant who works in construction and has all sorts of interesting talents

Thursday Murder Club, Book 1 | The Thursday Murder Club

That we’re at each other's throats all the time and that’s the way to gain power, to make money: distrust your neighbors and other people. That’s not my experience of life. We can all have different experiences and opinions but sit us in a room with a glass of wine and we’ll get along with all walks of life. That’s what I want to get across—that we are going to think different things about the world because our brains are different, but it doesn’t mean that we can’t concentrate on things we agree on. Kindness, strength and empathy are the pillars that bind those four characters together.

Werner Herzog’s Every Man for Himself and God Against All (Bodley Head, Oct), translated by Michael Hofmann, recounts the film-maker’s impoverished childhood in a Bavarian village where the family had to make a loaf of bread last a week and the children went without shoes in the summer. Herzog goes on to chronicle his early jobs herding cows, fishing for squid and working as a rodeo clown before rising to become a celebrated director of films including Grizzly Man, Fitzcarraldo and Rescue Dawn. The Last Devil to Die is the perfect blend of chaos, intrigue, investigation, manipulation, humor and pain. I laughed. I cried. Stephen's letter is absolutely heart-wrenching. I read it several times, wanting to burn the words into my brain, never to be forgotten. Possibly because of the way he grew up without a financial safety net, he has admitted to being obsessed with the metrics when it comes to his work today. “I don’t want someone at the end of the year looking at their balance sheet and going, ‘Oh God, Richard Osman cost us money’. That’s like a nightmare for me. I like to get what I’m worth, I like to be valued. But at the same time, I never want to be overvalued. I’ve got a proper work ethic, I’m a grafter.” Osman was 38 when Pointless first aired in 2009 (Photo: Matt Frost/BBC/Remarkable Television) The epistolary novel Yours from the Tower by Sally Nicholls (Andersen, Sept) explores the hopes, struggles and first loves of three friends at the end of the 19th century, who have left boarding school for very different lives.We hide so much in what we say. A British person might say to their neighbor, ‘Oh, your garden is looking lovely this evening,’ but what they might really be saying is, ‘You’re having an affair with my wife, I’m going to murder you this evening.’ We’ll never say what we actually mean. We’re brilliant at dancing around things. Returning in The Last Devil to Die are DCI Chris Hudson, PC Donna De Freitas and the unflappable, Bogdan Jankowski. Faber is best known for his novels Under the Skin and The Crimson Petal and the White, but he’s been incubating a different kind of book for years, one about his greatest passion, music. The result is a series of finely tuned observations formed from personal memories, nuggets of neuroscience and interviews with musical luminaries, in which he attempts to explain “what really happens when we hear, and what’s really going on when we listen”. The answer is a combination of biology and biography. Sounds simple enough: Faber’s kaleidoscope-like book explains why it really isn’t.