If you’re coming to the series from the Netflix movie, start at the top. If you’ve read the others, this is a high point.
The Thursday Murder Club is back and better than ever.
Former spy Elizabeth hasn’t been herself since her husband Stephen’s death, which explains the two-year gap since the group’s last outing. (Well, that and the fact that Osman was busy writing the first book in a new series, We Solve Murders.) Osman handled Stephen’s Alzheimer’s disease with great sensitivity in The Last Devil To Die (2023), and, here, it’s a pleasure to watch Elizabeth gradually re-engage with the world as her best friend, Joyce, prepares for her daughter’s wedding. About time, too, Joyce would probably say—Joanna has a successful career, but did she have to wait till her 40s to give Joyce that most coveted of relations, a son-in-law? And then what happens but that son-in-law’s best man, Nick, approaches Elizabeth at the reception and tells her someone tried to kill him that morning. The next day, Nick’s office is tossed, and he disappears. He’s in the security business, the owner of a remote storage facility where people can keep anything they choose in absolute privacy and safety. He and his partner, Holly, were once paid by a client in bitcoin that’s now worth 150 million pounds, and they each know half the code that would unlock it. They had just decided to sell it and had asked a few people for advice. All of these folks are now suspects in Nick’s attempted murder. Or is it actual murder? This being the Thursday Murder Club, there’s a lot more going on, of course. There are parts to play for Ibrahim, the psychologist who might be the most trusted man in England, and Ron, the former trade unionist who would do anything for his family—and his friends are his family, too. There are possibly reformed drug dealers, absolutely not reformed gangsters, a peer of the realm, the usual assortment of police officers, and a walk-on part for Prince Edward. There are satisfying red herrings and a well-constructed answer to the puzzle of what happened to Nick and why. And you’ll be happy just to have spent some time in Osman’s delightful world.
If you’re coming to the series from the Netflix movie, start at the top. If you’ve read the others, this is a high point.Pub Date: Sept. 30, 2025
ISBN: 9780593653258
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Pamela Dorman/Viking
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
PERSPECTIVES
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
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.
A sequel to The Grey Wolf (2024) that begins with the earlier novel’s last line: “We have a problem.” And what a problem it is.
Now that Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his allies in and out of the Sûreté du Québec have saved Canada’s water supply from poisoning on a grand scale, you might think they were entitled to some rest and relaxation in Three Pines. No such luck. Don Joseph Moretti, the Sixth Family head who ordered the hit-and-run on biologist Charles Langlois that nearly killed Gamache as well, is plotting still more criminal enterprises, and Gamache can’t be sure that Chief Inspector Evelyn Tardiff, who’s been cozying up to Moretti in order to get the goods on him, hasn’t gone over to the dark side herself. In fact, Gamache’s uncertainty about Evelyn sets the pattern for much of what follows, for another review of one of Langlois’ notebooks reveals a plot so monstrous that it’s impossible to be sure who’s not in on it. Is it really true, as paranoid online rumors have it, that “Canada is about to attack the U.S.”? Or is it really the other way around, as the discovery of War Plan Red would have it? As the threats loom larger and larger, they raise questions as to whether the Black Wolf, the evil power behind them, is Moretti, disgraced former Deputy Prime Minister Marcus Lauzon, whom Gamache has arranged to have released from prison, or someone even more highly placed. A brief introductory note dating Penny’s delivery of the uncannily prophetic manuscript to September 2024 will do little to assuage the anxieties of concerned readers.
Don’t feel that your current news feed is disturbing enough? Penny has just what you need.Pub Date: Oct. 28, 2025
ISBN: 9781250328175
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Minotaur
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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