The Thursday Murder Club

Full review can be found at: https://talesfromabsurdia.com/book-reviews/the-thursday-murder-club-review/

I wanted to love The Thursday Murder Club. I really did.

Like most people, I was drawn to it because of the author. I love Richard Osman; he's smart, witty, and possibly one of the most pleasant people on television.

So I'm sorry to say that I found The Thursday Murder Club to be a very poor novel.

The idea of a group of elderly people coming together to get to the bottom of unsolved crimes is a brilliant idea. It should be funny and perhaps even a little moving. And very occasionally, it is.

However, the plot is plodding and disinteresting and the characters are, on the whole, thinly-veiled stereotypes. We have the fraudulent priest; the supercapitalist property mogul; the socialist rabble-rouser; the hardworking Polish builder; the mid-life crisis policeman... I could go on.

If The Thursday Murder Club was a pastiche of sorts, you could maybe forgive the characterisation as a nod to the genre. But it isn't, and whilst it's probably unfair to say that it's lazy, I think the characters needed to have something more original about them.