The Last Devil To Die: The Thursday Murder Club 4

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Osman doesn’t disappoint… Everything is here that fans of the series have come to expect: humour, warmth, the confounding of expectations as these pensioners investigate… Along with the laughs, there is grief, and an ending that is handled sensitively (I was weeping)… We all need a regular injection of the Thursday Murder Club to keep our spirits up.” This is an emotional and heartbreaking read. Osman handles a delicate situation with care. He balances the hardship with love and support. He also weaves in a lot of fun and humor. This is one of the few series that makes me laugh out loud. Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from Bookshop.org, who support independent bookshops Osman follows The Bullet That Missed with a bittersweet mystery about the problems facing many older people: dementia, computer fraud, death. Humor does, however, alleviate the poignancy inthis strongest, most emotional book in the best-selling series.”

The world is becoming a whisper to Kuldesh now. Wife gone, friends falling. He misses the roar of life. The justification for the group getting involved in solving crimes is always sketchy, but that’s fair enough. Why waste time explaining it? Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim will be better than the police – even than their chums in the force, Chris and Donna.And yet, just as visits to ­Coopers Chase are becoming an annual tradition, Osman has announced that he is to ­abandon the Club for a while to write a new series “about a father-in-law/daughter-in-law detective duo”. Thank goodness that in an afterword to this book, he promises to reassemble Joyce and co soon. It will take a lot more of the ­painful reality of old age to intrude on Coopers Chase before it stops being, for hundreds of thousands of readers, an essential refuge from the cares of real life. I cannot think of another series with a more moving exploration of love after a lifetime together, and The Last Devil To Die reduced me to tears at more than one point.” I think that the people who actually read the books wouldn’t call them cosy crime,” the 52-year-old says firmly. “That’s the sort of thing you might read in an article, but they’re really not. They have some wit to them and some charm and all of that. But they deal with quite serious things and they hopefully have something to say about the country we live in.” So what is it about the Thursday Murder Club books that make them so broadly appealing? The simple answer is that they are really good. The writing is pithy and fresh, so much so that I kept writing down lines from The Last Devil To Die. Osman describes a character who comes into the group’s orbit “only because Joyce couldn't resist a deep voice and a sense of mystery.” Early on, the club wonders if “it might be nice for the Thursday Murder Club to have a new project that moved at a gentler pace than usual. Something a bit less murdery would be quite a novelty.” The foursome can escape a confrontation with an armed murderer using nothing but a kindly smile and a poisoned slice of Battenberg. The threats, the victims, even the crimes themselves, never really matter. If the villains enjoy tea and cake too, their sins may be forgiven; the group employs a brand of vigilante justice that respects no laws or conventional morality. They adopt a Polish builder, Bogdan, though they suspect he’s a killer himself; become firm friends with charismatic drug dealer Connie after entrapping and imprisoning her; and bring cheery former KGB colonel Viktor along with them after deciding not to kill him.

With Elizabeth preoccupied with Stephen’s care, Joyce takes the lead. Ron is Ron, while the reader finally learns more about Ibrahim’s past. A new friend comes into the fold, and some new residents of Coopers Chase find themselves in scandalous situations. Also, the criminal characters are entertaining, and I especially enjoyed Garth’s character. Donna, Chris, and Bogdan also play significant roles. In his author's note, Osman indicates that he is working on a new series, so it might be some time before we can visit with our good friends from Coopers Chase again. I'm glad to know that he has not retired them for good, because I'm invested in this friendship now and I look forward to seeing them again some Thursday in the future. Osman concocts a satisfyingly complex whodunit full of neat twists and wrong turns. But unlike most crime novelists, he ensures his book’s strength and momentum stem not from its plot or its thrills but rather its perfectly formed characters. Once again, the quartet of friends makes for delightful company… Heartwarming and enthralling. ‘They carried a kind of magic, the four of them,’ a policeman muses. That magic is still there in abundance.” Osman and I end the Zoom call a few minutes later. I'm still thinking about the last line in The Last Devil to Die, uttered by Joyce but equally an encapsulation of Osman's relationship with his readers: “I know it sounds silly, but I feel less alone when I write. So thank you for keeping me company, whoever you might be.”Osman shares in his author’s note that he is working on a new series, so it might be some time before we see our friends from Coopers Chase. I will miss them.

Bestselling author Richard Osman’s latest book, The Last Devil to Die, is out September 19, 2023—and despite rumors, won’t be the final installment in his Thursday Murder Club Mystery series. picture alliance // Getty Images 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.” Humor is an integral part of the Thursday Murder Club series. It frequently manifests itself in the dance between the Club and the official police. Naturally, the Club members pride themselves on their devious methods of finding what lies behind the façade of murder and mayhem. The police, understandably, would prefer to investigate without a quartet of old codgers always beating them to the punch. Same old/same old, until police from the outside take over the investigation of Kuldesh Sharma’s death. Actions have consequences: the local constabulary and the Club join forces.

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But what truly touched me was how Osman and Shaw portrayed dementia in the story. It was the most heartbreaking, beautiful thing I had ever read/listened to. The sensitivity and authenticity with which they depicted this challenging condition added a layer of depth and poignancy to the narrative that left me deeply moved. How would he define the Osman brand? “The nice thing about having been on TV is people sort of know who I am – it would be quite hard to hide your true self over 14 years on telly,” he ventures. “So I think they know that I wish to make the world a slightly better place by any means necessary. That’s sort of the brand, I guess.” Let’s see what his critics make of that.