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
SEEN & HEARD
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
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.
After more than three decades of producing bestselling legal thrillers, Grisham tries his hand at a whodunit.
Eleanor Barnett wants Simon Latch to write her a will. That’s pretty much his job description, since practicing law in Braxton, Virginia, for 18 years hasn’t given him much opportunity to spread his wings. But the case of Netty, as she insists he call her, is different. She’s an 85-year-old widow whose second husband, Harry Korsak, left her with something like $20 million in cash and securities. She has a pair of stepsons, Clyde and Jerry Korsak, she’s determined to disinherit. And she already has a will, a document Wally Thackerman drafted a few weeks ago that basically allowed him, as Simon soon discovers, to pillage her estate. So instead of following his usual procedure and asking his longtime secretary, Matilda Clark, to type out the will, Simon types it himself and has it witnessed without saying anything to her. Of course he’d never do what Wally Thackerman did, but given his poverty, his gambling addiction, and his estrangement from his wife, Paula, whose income is a lot more stable than his own, he wouldn’t mind drawing just a bit on Netty’s wealth. As it happens, his new client turns out to be more trouble than she’s worth, maybe even more trouble than she would’ve been worth to Wally. And when she ends up dying, her death is swiftly identified as murder, with every indication that Simon killed her himself. The whodunit is unremarkable, but Grisham handles the legal complexities of the case with professional finesse and adds a wonderfully poignant portrait of a nothingburger lawyer trying his best to keep things more or less legal.
Everything you’d expect from Grisham, and this time something more.Pub Date: Oct. 21, 2025
ISBN: 9780385548984
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
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