Your next must-read mystery series.
The Thursday Murder Club gets into another spot of bother, this time involving some British television celebrities, a Russian former spy, and an international money launderer—among others.
This is the third book in real-life British TV celebrity Osman's delightful series of mysteries set at Coopers Chase, a bucolic English retirement community. The first two have been bestsellers on both sides of the Atlantic, and Steven Spielberg has bought the movie rights; if you haven't read the earlier books, The Thursday Murder Club (2020) and The Man Who Died Twice (2021), it would be a good idea to go back and start at the beginning. As this installment opens, the four septuagenarian members of the club—former MI6 agent Elizabeth Best, retired nurse Joyce Meadowcroft, psychiatrist Ibrahim Arif, and longtime union organizer Ron Ritchie—are investigating another murder from their cold-case files. It seems that Bethany Waites, a local TV journalist, was about to crack a huge tax avoidance scheme when her car went over a cliff 10 years ago. Who was she going to meet late at night? Why wasn't her car caught on more surveillance cameras between her home and the cliff? Of course, the friends aren't content to do their research online; they inveigle their way into a variety of situations that enable them to question Bethany's friends and colleagues, the chief constable in charge of the case, the drug dealer they put in jail in the last volume (who's determined to kill Ron as soon as she gets out), and many other more or less savory characters. And that's not even to mention the mysterious Viking who's threatening to kill Joyce if Elizabeth doesn't kill Viktor Illyich, a competitor-turned-friend who, when he worked for the KGB, was known as the Bullet. All of this enables Osman to engineer scenes such as "three old men...the gangster, the KGB colonel and the trades union official" playing snooker, drinking whiskey, and thinking maybe this is all they really need in life. The mysteries are complex, the characters vivid, and the whole thing is laced with warm humor and—remarkably, considering the body count—good feeling.
Your next must-read mystery series.Pub Date: Sept. 20, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-59-329939-5
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: July 12, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
PROFILES
SEEN & HEARD
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.
A luxury liner bound for New York in 1924 becomes the scene of a twisty golden age pastiche.
When an unnamed third-class passenger discovers the body of an elderly man at the bottom of an exterior flight of stairs aboard the Endeavour, Capt. McCrory insists it must be an accident. But James Temple, a Scotland Yard detective who just happens to be aboard, says that no one would have ventured to the outdoor steps in the rain without a coat, so the death should be treated as suspicious. Unable to stop Temple from investigating, McCrory assigns ship’s officer Timothy Birch to accompany him, and Birch promptly becomes the world’s most unwilling Dr. Watson, constantly battling Temple over theories and procedures. Anxious that they have only four days to find a potential killer before the ship docks and lets its 2,000 passengers roam free in New York, he’s especially infuriated at the leisurely pace marked by Temple’s bromide, “Facts before witnesses.” There’s reason to sympathize with Temple, because the suspects in first and second class (the only classes that matter in this ultra-class-conscious world) are cardboard cutouts—the successful banker, his trophy wife, the aspiring artists, the gallery owner—who are much less interesting than the secrets they’re hiding. In his most anachronistic development, author Hindle shows Birch, unlike the imperturbable sidekicks he echoes, sunk in grief over his vanished daughter, Amelia, and his estranged wife, Kate, who left him after Amelia disappeared during one of his ocean voyages. He’d do anything to get his daughter back, he tells Temple, and his determination leads to the biggest surprise of all.
Enough clues, red herrings, and false endings to make readers feel that the Orient Express has put out to sea.Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2026
ISBN: 9798217185740
Page Count: 464
Publisher: Dutton
Review Posted Online: July 20, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2026
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
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