I will not make you wait till the end of this review to learn that you need to wait till the end of ‘The Thursday Murder Club’ to learn what it is you wanted to learn.
Gosh, what a sentence..
This book has been unorthodox and I’m here for it, but it ended up being what all mediocre crime/thriller novels end up being; which is a dump fest of answers in the last chapters of it.
Let me take it from the top though, cuz I’m jumping ahead of myself.
The Thursday Murder Club currently composes of four members, pushing 80 years of age, who have taken it upon themselves to solve old cold cases. They all live in the retirement village called Coopers Chase and they meet weekly to discuss the cases they can get their hands on. All of a sudden though, Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron and Ibrahim find themselves in the middle of a fresh murder case, when the village’s owner right hand-man gets killed.
The premise of the story is compelling and it is one of the main reasons I picked up this book. Well this, and the fact that I thought it is one of the classic novels that everyone has read or heard of, except for me, only to learn it was first published couple of years ago.. talk about anti-climax.
Each of the main characters has a unique personality which contributes well into the storyline and all in all, they work well with one another. Majority of the chapters are general narrative from 3rd person perspective but occasional diary entries from Joyce feature also, giving it a bit more of an insight into the inner thoughts of that particular club member.
The Thursday Murder Club has everything it needs in order to succeed: the mystery/crime aspect of it is compelling, there’s humour and the characters are both funny and insightful. It doesn’t necessarily cover extensively, but it does mention a lot of deeper topics such as old age, illnesses, etc. Yet, all in all, it felt short. As much as I enjoyed reading it – it was enjoyable to breeze through it, it didn’t have this excitement and edge that I like in these types of books.
You can have too much choice in this world. And when everyone has too much choice, it is also much harder to get chosen. And we all want to be chosen.
Richard Osman, The Thursday Murder Club
Introduction of secondary characters felt chaotic, there were loads of them and it was hard to keep track so early on. However, it is the murder solving part that was the biggest disappointment. It is your typical, awful storyline downfall where the mystery gets explained as an after thought in the last pages, telling you how they got to the conclusion they got to, without giving reader the ability to get there themselves beforehand. Which is such a damn shame because the premise of this book is just phenomenal, even if the characters and what they’re up to is not always realistic or legal. It would have been lovely to be able to follow the mystery along the way more easily and figure stuff out for myself, rather than it being written out for me.
I have such mixed feelings about this one, I’ll be honest. I am forcing myself a little to remain unbiased, because I loved the main characters so much, they’re definitely skewing my view of the novel in general.
The Wolf Pad 