Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club is that “now for something completely different” you’ve always heard about.
In this book – and the second, which I’ve just started – the sleuths are a group of senior citizens in a retirement community. They come from all sorts of different backgrounds, from a psychiatrist to a housewife, with one elderly lady having a highly hush-hush past she hints at but never fully reveals to anyone (though she always manages to find just the right person who owes her a favor when they need banking information or someone’s criminal history).
In the first book, the group has been trying to solve “dead cases” left behind by one of their friends, who has developed dementia & is in the memory care unit of the retirement community. They meet on Thursdays, thus their group name. While they ponder their latest case, they encounter a real-life murder in the village, a local thuggish sort is found bludgeoned to death in his home, just after he’s been fired by the little-loved owner of the retirement community. There’s a mysterious skeleton in a double grave, lots of senior citizen shenanigans, & several additional mysteries that crop up during the story, but we eventually wind our way to the solutions. The ending is bittersweet, as all stories bout this age group are wont to be, but satisfying. If you’d like a different sort of mystery, pick up a copy of The Thursday Murder Club and give it a try.