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Title: The Thursday Murder ClubAuthor: Richard OsmanFormat reviewed: EbookSource: NetgalleyPublisher: PenguinPublication Date: 3rd September 2020Rating: 3 Stars
In a peaceful retirement village, four unlikely friends meet up once a week to investigate unsolved murders.
But when a brutal killing takes place on their very doorstep, the Thursday Murder Club find themselves in the middle of their first live case.
Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron might be pushing eighty but they still have a few tricks up their sleeves.
Can our unorthodox but brilliant gang catch the killer before it's too late?
From the moment the deal had been announced for this book I was very curious, I'm a huge fan of Richard Osman on Pointless, House of Games, and any other programmes he crops up in, so was very interested to see how good this writing endeavours would be.
And well, I'm still largely undecided having read The Thursday Murder Club. And I think the reason I didn't fully love the book, was I initially had big formatting issues with the advance copy from Netgalley, which kept taking me away from the story, but at around 60% when I was on the verge of wondering if I could read more with the issues my copy had, I thought I'd try re-downloading in case a newer version had been uploaded.
That fixed things, and I wish I had thought of it earlier as it felt at that point I was reading a much more polished book that I believe to be closer to the final version that is available, and I was able to lose myself within the pages a lot more.
I have many questions unanswered from finishing this but I know its the first book in the series, so the odds are I do want o read the next book, now that I'm used to the writing style and the characters.
I may be sounding negative, but its awkward to write a review when all the best bits happen far too far in for me to comment on, and that possibly due to the issues I had initially I may not have quite taken in all the background supplied for the characters - which is on me, and nothing to do with the book itself.
I loved the concept of these four members of a retirement village being completely delighted when a real live murder falls into their laps as they are determined to solve it ahead of the police.
Elizabeth is an intriguing character, who seemed to be able to get everyone around to her way of thinking, Then there is Joyce who we get to know through her diary, but I'm nor really sure why she was writing a diary.
There is a huge cast of characters and I think I would have followed it a lot better had it been a film, which may just mean I wasn't quite in the right frame of mind to read this when I did, as normally I don't struggle with that.
It's a book and series that shows promise, it improved for me as I continued reading, but at the same time, I couldn't really tell what it was trying to be. Not really a murder mystery, not really cosy crime, not really general fiction, not really enough character development for me, or background to the characters.
At times I was really enjoying it and other points I was wondering how I had been reading for a while but felt like I'd made no progress with the book.
I'm just so conflicted but I'm glad I was able to read it, and I am curious about book 2, especially if I get a properly formatted copy to start with as I suspect a lot of my issues were caused by that.
Thank you to Penguin and Netgalley for this copy which I have reviewed honestly and voluntarily.
I enjoyed this book, but I think there was so much hype about this book, Rachel, that the reading could never quite live up to it. I'm certainly looking forward to the film - Stephen Spielberg has apparently bought the rights!
ReplyDeleteI think that may be exactly it, I often have this reaction to highly hyped things, but I do think the formatting issues in my copy meant my reading was disjointed for the first half, before I thought to talk to anyone else who had read it to see if it was just me!
DeleteI bet the film will be fabulous.