The Last Devil To Die: The Thursday Murder Club 4

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There may be other aged detectives in print and on television,but for wit, intelligence and humanity, the Thursday Murder Club outranks them all.” Delivers the same kind of clever dialogue, colorful characters and corkscrew plotting that made the other books so much fun… As you reach the last chapters of this book, you’ll think you’ve figured out the mystery. You’ll think so several times. ButOsmanand the Thursday Murder Club will keep the surprises coming.” 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. I think we're all very aware of how rare it is to find a writer who just never stops delivering. Its like dating in your twenties, you fall for a pretty face across the room and spend a dazzling few weeks or maybe even months being wooed right off your feet with poetry, pretty gifts, and hot sex but then some time goes by and the honeymoon's over and its just the same verse, gifts and positions over and over again.

On December 27 th , at eleven p.m., alone in his car, Kuldesh waits for someone. He’s near eighty; memories flood his mind. I have started writing it now and it’s a load of fun,” he says. “It’s a completely different cast of characters, which is great for me. We’ll see how people react.” Authors who can reconnect people with the primal emotion of pleasure reading are worth our close attention. Commercial success doesn't just happen in a vacuum, after all—it takes a whole life, sometimes several iterations of that life, to get there, even as it often boils down to a simple idea: if you write what you want to read, and you enjoy doing so, others will want to read and enjoy what you write, too. Richard Osman knows this better than almost anybody. I highly recommend The Last Devil to Die to those readers who enjoy a Cozy Mystery with a solid group of main characters!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.

Fall is in the air and I was finally able to pull out all my coziest clothes again, so what better audiobook to match the mood of the season? The Last Devil to Die, book number four in the cozy crime series The Thursday Murder Club. While others celebrated autumn’s return of pumpkin spice in all its disturbingly copious forms … I enjoyed my annual visit to Coopers Chase Retirement Village and its clever septuagenarian sleuths: Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibraham, Ron. 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. There is something fitting about speaking with Richard Osman from my childhood bedroom. It's early August and I'm in Ottawa, Canada's capital, to visit my mother, who turned eighty-one just a few weeks before. She's lived in this house for almost forty years—the balance of my life. And she, like me and like millions of readers on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond, cannot get enough of Osman's Thursday Murder Club series of mystery novels, which feature a quartet of retirement village dwellers who band together to solve murders.This book was part of my birthday present to myself. Yesterday I decided that it was time to enjoy it. This makes two nights in a row that I have stayed up far too late reading, unusual for a woman who is often in bed before 10 p.m. 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.” Kuldesh doesn’t have the box with him but he’s sure he can explain that away. He hopes to be “ on his way before the snow turns to ice .” Sadly, that’s not to be. This is not a new phenomenon. Agatha Christie had been publishing mysteries for over two decades when the Second World War made her a household name, and she began her career in 1920, two years removed from the end of the WWI and the influenza pandemic. Osman’s greatest strength is fusing the puzzle-mastery of Christie and her Golden Age peers with emotional earnestness and wry humor. Mortality is a subject simply too great to be avoided entirely, but it can be done without sinking into despair.

The strands of the plot multiply entertainingly and get tied together in the usual satisfying way… Osman serves up another delightful mystery.”Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival. Three minutes into a Zoom call with Richard Osman, I receive excellent news. I had prepared myself for a bittersweet task: to speak with Osman about the Thursday Murder Club, my favorite book series, on the eve of the publication of The Last Devil to Die, which I believe to be the final book. But Osman corrects me: while he’ll be moving on from the Thursday Murder Club series to write a new series, it’s a pause, not a stop, with future books to follow. “By the end of this book, hopefully readers would agree that the characters deserve a year off,” he jokes. I'm always sad when I get to the end of another book in the Thursday Murder Club series but I know there's more to come from these septuagenarians. It may be a bit longer wait this time around for Book #5 but I'll be here for it when it's published.

It's Boxing Day lunch at Cooper's Chase, a retirement village in South East England, where resident septuagenarians Elizabeth, Ron, Ibrahim, and Joyce learn about the murder of antiques dealer, Kuldesh Sharma, who also happens to be a friend of Stephen, Elizabeth's husband. While author Richard Osman will be moving on to write a second series, he assured me (and the many other readers who are similarly invested) that he’ll return to the funny, sweet stories of my favorite retirement home sleuths. The Last Devil to Die is a beautiful send-off that will get us through the wait.” Yes, this group has insanely outlandish adventures. But the friendships ring true and the dialogue is hilarious. <--this is what we're all here for, right? Because of course, there is always more than one mystery to solve in these, and the little reveals at the end are usually even more fun than the BIG REVEAL.

Toys

Usually by the fourth book in a series, my interest starts to wane and I don’t continue on, but I have grown fond of this gang, and look forward to what’s next! The cast was a bit smaller this time but still had diverse and fascinating characters including an art forger, her comically psychotic Canadian husband, some drug runners, a couple museum experts, a victim of romance fraud, a brief return of Stephen’s friend, antiques dealer Kuldesh Sharma, imprisoned drug maven Connie, and of course, the eminently lovable Bogdan, along with detectives Donna, Chris and others. Narrator Fiona Shaw did a stellar job once again of voicing them all.