Osman has created a fantasy world
for his quartet of retirees, but it is a world with enough reality, warmth and
heart for anyone. (Review by Margaret von Klemperer, courtesy of The Witness)
The endearing quartet of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club – Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim - are back in their retirement complex of Coopers’ Chase for a fifth outing. Of course, it’s not entirely believable, but then, it’s not meant to be. And it is enormous fun.
In The Last Devil to Die, the previous novel in the series, Elizabeth’s husband died from dementia – a topic Richard Osman handled with charm and gentleness – there is enough reality in this series to make it compelling. Elizabeth is perhaps not back to her sharpest, but the others are supporting her, and things begin to prickle her antennae at Joyce’s daughter’s wedding when the best man confides to her that someone is trying to kill him. The wedding itself is vintage Osman – funny and clever as it deals with the prickliness that can be a part of the mother/daughter relationship in stressful moments like a wedding. And Joyce and Joanna are very good at rubbing each other up the wrong way.
Meanwhile, Ibrahim is feeling lonely, even though he is busy counselling a convicted drug dealer, and Ron is facing troubles of his own with his daughter and beloved grandson struggling in an abusive domestic relationship.
However, it is the misfortunes of the best man that drive the plot. He has a business partner, and they run a storage facility for secrets – much safer than storing them on a computer it seems. But to open the safe that holds their own secret fortune, each of them has to put in a code – and each of them only knows their own code. And as things move along, one of them ends up dead and the other missing.
But it would take more than that to defeat the Murder Club. They have a wide range of contacts – police, ex (or maybe not ex) secret service agents, criminals, scammers and possible hit-men and hit-women – and they put them to good use in their efforts to crack the codes and, just maybe, get their hands on a fortune in crypto currency as well as find the missing person. But, inevitably, not everything is going to be quite what it seems.
Yes, Osman has created a fantasy world for his quartet of retirees, but it is a world with enough reality, warmth and heart for anyone. - Margaret von Klemperer
The Impossible Fortune is published by Penguin Viking: ISBN 978-0-241-74399-7