Ponder: The Thursday Murder Club

The Thursday Murder Club ©2020 by Richard Osman is a humorous delight to read. The club is made up of four septuagenarians -- Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim -- who live in a retirement village called Coopers Chase. They meet in the Jigsaw Room weekly to solve cold case murders. Amongst themselves, they possess a variety of special talents from before they retired that work together amazingly well, enabling them solve murders. Add in the skill sets of their grown children, or all the unique connections of the contacts they'd cultivated during their careers, and they are an amazingly efficient sleuth force to be reckoned with. Not all the crimes are cold cases such as the stabbing one they initially explore from the past. Recently and currently, there is a bludgeoning, a shooting, and a poisoning that the quartet analyze with calm aplomb. 

Joyce, one of the four, keeps a diary. Her musings seem to run a bit astray sometimes and do not always advance the plot; but they certainly do evoke a chuckle or two from the reader. The diary entries are well worth including since they are a creative mechanism for not only providing a useful consolidation of facts but also delivering a delightful sprinkling of tongue-in-cheek views of the residents and suspects.  

The retirement setting was especially engaging for me. My husband and I, both septuagenarians ourselves, have been considering such a relocation for ourselves. Coopers Chase with Willow, its accompanying nursing home for the village, are the very model for the site we are thinking about. The entire Chapter 3 describes Coopers Chase to the extent I thought the author may have been inspired by the brochure for the place we've been considering except that Coopers Chase is on the site of a former convent. An excerpt from Chapter 3 reads:

Beside the swimming pool is a small "arthritis therapy pool" which looks like a Jacuzzi largely for the reason it is a Jacuzzi. ...Take the lift up to the recreation rooms next -- the gym and the exercise studio, where residents could happily Zumba among the ghosts of the single beds. Then there's the Jigsaw Room for gentler activities and associations. There's the library, and the lounge for the bigger and more controversial committee meetings, or for football on the big flat-screen TV. Then down again to the ground floor where the long low tables of the convent refractory are now the "contemporary upscale restaurant."

The Thursday Murder Club is the first in a series of four books. I am definitely going to seek out the other three to read. Per https://books.org/blog/richard-osman-books-in-order/

I rate The Thursday Murder Club four stars, subtracting one star because of the limited demographic of its audience. Amazon readers gave The Thursday Murder Club a 4.3 out of 5 rating, even though it was a New York Times best selling book, probably for the same reader based reason. 

★★★★☆ Really good; maybe only one weak aspect or limited audience

I enjoyed this book and have put myself on the library waitlist for the second one, The Man Who Died Twice. And there is indeed a waitlist.