The Thursday Murder Club

These are my notes about The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, published September 3, 2020. This is the first book in the popular Thursday Murder Club Series.

I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by Lesley Manville in an outstanding performance. To clarify some of the details I mention below, I then read a digital copy of the book.

I am relistening to the first four audiobooks in the series as a review before listening to the fifth book, The Impossible Fortune, which was published last month (September, 2025).

The following notes contain major spoilers. Don’t read these comments until after you have read the book.

This is the first book in an intelligent, charming, cheerful, and very popular series that at the time of writing contains five books.

I was having trouble keeping all the facts in my head for murder mysteries, hence these notes.

Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron, and Ibrahim are pensioners (retirees) who live in a posh English retirement community, Coopers Chase Retirement Village. With their friend Penny, who has been incapacitated by a stroke, they have started the Thursday Murder Club, which is devoted to investigating cold murder cases. Then two murders occur in their community, Fairhaven, and the Thursday Murder Club springs into action. The personality of each character is well-defined, and the writing is sensitive yet humorous. The novel takes place in about 2015, maybe 2020.

This may be a cozy murder mystery, but the body count is surprisingly high: I counted twelve unnatural deaths. I enumerate below, without context for the names, the unnatural deaths in order by the internal timeline but not in the order in which we learn about them:

• suicide of Margaret (Maggie) Farrell, a pregnant nun, in 1971
• death of Maggie’s fetus, which dies with her
• murder of Annie Madely, who had been stabbed to death in 1973 (“nearly fifty years ago”) by her boyfriend, Peter Mercer, (a cold case from the past); the boyfriend has disappeared after running from Penny Gray’s squad car
• murder of Peter Mercer by Penny Gray (in the past while Penny was an inspector)
• murder of a young boy from London by Tony Curran at the Black Bridge in 2000, witnessed by a taxicab driver, Kazamir (a friend of Bogdan Jankowski’s)
• murder of the taxicab driver, Kazimir, by Turkish Johnny, ordered by Tony Curran (2000)
• murder of Turkish Johnny (Johnny Gunduz) by Bogdan Jankowski and Steve Ercan (2000)
• murder of Tony Curran, the builder who works for Ian Ventham, the owner of Coopers Chase; this is the first murder in the book, and Tony is bludgeoned with a spanner; the killer places a photograph on the worktop; in Chapter 114, Bogdan Jankowski tells Stephen that he killed Tony Curran
• murder of Ian Ventham by John Gray with a syringe filled with fentanyl; John is protecting Penny, who had buried Peter Mercer in the cemetery after killing him
• suicide of Bernard Cottle
• murder of Penny Gray by her husband John Gray
• subsequent suicide of John

There is another death with unusual circumstances. After Bernard Cottle’s wife Asima died, Bernard secretly buried her ashes under a bench on the grounds of the retirement community.

Other notes:

Penny Gray (a former inspector in the Kent Police), is the source of files of unsolved murder cases, and by the time of the novel a nonparticipating member of the Thursday Murder Club because of strokes, she now lives in a coma in the nursing home.

Bogdan and Steve Ercan took Johnny’s camera and presumably obtained the photo that Bogdan left with Tony Curran’s body and also mailed to someone.

Stephen, Joyce, and undoubtedly Elizabeth have all figured out that Bogdan Jankowski killed Tony Curran, but they don’t report this to the police. Bogdan lives on in the later novels as a trusted ally of the Thursday Murder Club. Bogdan confesses to Stephen, Elizabeth’s husband; Stephen has Alzheimer’s and may not remember the conversation. But Joyce believes Bogdan is the murderer.

If I think too hard about the plot, I conclude that it is not realistic or plausible, but the book is fun. Osman does an excellent job giving each character distinct behavorial and personality traits.

See my notes about the second book in the series, The Man Who Died Twice.

My rating: Very good, four stars