At Coopers Chase, a retirement village in the English countryside, residents enjoy all the usual pastimes: Pilates, wine, and complaining about the soup. No dreary rooms, underpaid under-valued staff, or sitting around in a communal lounge for them. It’s an old people’s home so far removed from reality, they would likely need a visa to visit the real world.
Tucked away in a quiet meeting room is a far more unusual activity: the Thursday Murder Club. Because really, what else would you do after sudoku.
The club’s members are four retirees with more secrets than a MI6 filing cabinet.
– Elizabeth, who was definitely not a spy, although she suspiciously knows how to disappear people, procure classified documents, and phone a “contact” in Bulgaria at short notice.
– Joyce, a kindly ex-nurse whose diary entries suggest she is the sort of woman who offers you cake while quietly noticing you’ve got blood on your shoes.
– Ibrahim, a retired psychiatrist who believes every motive can be explained by childhood trauma, even if the trauma in question was simply being served weak tea.
– And Ron, a former trade union firebrand who has never met a police officer he didn’t want to out-argue.
Every Thursday, they gather not for bridge or book club, but to investigate old unsolved murders, usually with the same casual enthusiasm most people reserve for discussing Strictly Come Dancing. It’s all rather harmless—until a very fresh corpse appears on the local property developer’s kitchen floor.
The victim, Tony Curran, was the kind of man you might describe as “a businessman” if you were being polite, and “a downright crook” if you weren’t. The fact that someone has murdered him surprises no one. The only real mystery is who got to him first. Suddenly, the Thursday Murder Club is in its element, delighted that the murders have finally come to them, like Uber Eats but with corpses.
Enter the local police: PC Donna De Freitas, ambitious and under-appreciated, and DCI Chris Hudson, tired and over-appreciated by pastry. Both find themselves besieged by four pensioners who treat them less as law enforcement and more as a delivery service for case files. The officers, naturally, attempt to maintain authority, while the club members, naturally, ignore them entirely.
As the investigation unfolds, we meet an assortment of suspects, red herrings, and at least one person who almost certainly regrets moving into a retirement village with such an aggressive murder rate. Between blackmail, old grudges, and the occasional dodgy land deal, it becomes clear that Coopers Chase is less “haven for the elderly” and more “Agatha Christie theme park.”
Of course, the club eventually pieces everything together with unnerving precision. (Of course). Elizabeth employs spycraft. Ibrahim uses psychology. Joyce keeps meticulous notes. And Ron… well, Ron just shouts at people until they confess. By the end, the culprits are revealed, justice of a sort is served, and the police pretend they solved it all themselves, which everyone politely agrees to.
One can view with joy that the author’s retirees face the end of life with wit, friendship, and a total disregard for rules. Or the writing could be seen as being stereotypical condascending crock-lit which doesn’t do justice to Osman’s clear brilliance. Guess which I think.
Either way, The Thursday Murder Club lives on, ready for next week’s meeting—because in Coopers Chase, there’s always another body just around the corner. And why knit scarves when you can unravel homicides?
