He’s back: ‘We Solve Murders’ by Richard Osman
I’ve missed the gang from Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club series so much: Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron, and their associated buddies. I wasn’t sure I would warm to Osman’s new series as much. I mean, how could any new characters be as wonderful as those four?
I needn’t have worried. While We Solve Murders features new characters, new crimes, and definitely a much more multinational setting, the charm and trademark humour is there, the quirkiness of many of the characters, the twisty plot guaranteeing a page-turning absorption.
As always for me, the crimes and plot are incidental. It’s the characters and their emotional arcs, and Osman’s dry humour, that grab me and keep me reading.
In this new series we meet three main protagonists. Steve is a retired cop, settled now in a small village in England’s New Forest. While he still grieves the death of his beloved wife Debbie, he’s become a part of this community: the pub quiz on Wednesday nights, the group of friends he meets there for lunches, his cat Trouble. He likes his routine and the predictable life he’s created here.
His daughter-in-law Amy, on the other hand, thrives on adrenaline and adventure as a private security officer who crisscrosses the world on the job. At the novel’s opening Amy is on a private island, tasked with keeping Rosie D’Antonia, famous author of thriller and crime novels, safe.
That’s where the novel starts but it doesn’t stay there long. Amy and Rosie begin a chase to find a killer before he or she can get to them, and Steve is – very reluctantly – dragged in to help.
It’s a complicated and at times madcap series of events from here that lead to the final showdown. In the process we get to know the threesome well and – speaking for myself at least – I was reluctant to part with them at the final page.
It is a measure of the author’s skill that he can leave the reader breathless on one page and then on the very next, have a scene between a father and son that is both incredibly moving and very funny, so that you don’t know if your tears are from sadness or from laughter.
I’m already looking forward to We Solve Murders #2
We Solve Murders was published by Penguin Random House in 2024.
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3 Comments
Kris N
Absolutely agree! I’m about 3/4 way thru’ the audiobook & – as usual – I don’t want to «put it down »! Unusual characters, totally relatable; & I think it’s the humour & humanity of
Osman that keep me addicted to his work.
Denise Newton
Yep, always the characters!
Olivia
Adding to my TBR list!