Read time: 4 minutes
📱📖 Read on Kobo
📃 421 pages
⏱ Duration: 5 hours
🏷️ Publisher: Viking
Genre: Cozy Mystery
Book Blurb:
When shocking news reaches the Thursday Murder Club, they’re pulled into another tangled investigation. An old friend in the antiques business has been murdered, and a mysterious package he guarded has gone missing. As Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim dig deeper, they face art forgers, online scams, and the darkest question of all—how do you keep going when loss hits home? This fourth installment blends Osman’s signature humor with raw human grief, and proves that even in the twilight years, love and friendship can still save the day.
Let’s talk … murder!!!
This book broke me! I was of course expecting sharp wit, a murder that shouldn’t be funny but somehow is, Joyce’s dairy entries making me snort-laugh, and a tidy resolution with smuggled goods and suspicious antiques. What I didn’t expect was hot deeply it would hurt. That’s the thing with Richard Osman. He lures you in with lunch plans that include a smuggler, a killer, a Canadian ghost, a con artist, and an antiques professor, like it’s just another afternoon, and somewhere between the laughs, he quietly breaks your entire heart.
The laughs are still there. The mystery is solid. Art forgery, heroin, an execution-style murder that kicks everything off. The plot threads weave together the way Osman does best in a purposely messy but satisfying end. But let’s be honest. Nobody reading Book Four of this series is here purely for the whodunit. We’re here for them. The beating heart of this story belongs to Stephen and Elizabeth. Their love, tangled in dementia and its slow theft of memory, shines brighter than any twist or reveal. When Stephen’s journey comes full circle, everything else fades into grey. You feel Elizabeth’s silence, her grief, her stillness, and the world momentarily stops, for you too, along with her. And this is where Osman asks us to pay the emotional price of loving these characters. The dementia storyline with Stephen was always on the horizon, but nothing prepared me for how it lands. It doesn’t happen loudly. It happens quietly, steadily, like a light being turned down on a dimmer watch.
The impact:
I finished this book and genuinely zombied out. Couldn’t sleep. Kept thinking about what it means to love someone through memory loss, to lose them while they’re still right there. This book is a love letter to dementia and their caregivers, to people watching their favorite person disappear in real time, and Osman handles it with such devastating tenderness that I’m still not okay. A reminder that even in a mystery, the most haunting unknown is the human heart itself.
This isn’t just the best book in the series, this is the best book ever. Full stop. I don’t know how he would top it. I am not sure he needs to.
Would I recommend it?
This is the Thursday Murder Club at its most human, most hilarious, and most heartbreaking all at once. The mystery is fun, the banter is beautiful, but the real star is the love story buried inside it. If you’ve been following the series, this is the one that will wreck you in the best possible way. Osman outdoes himself. This is storytelling with a soul.
Keep tissues close!
5 Books to Read Next:
- Still Life by Louise Penny – For readers craving moral depth and emotional investigation.
Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy - A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman – For another tender portrayal of loss and resilience.
Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy - Still Alice by Lisa Genova — For the dementia storyline that gutted you
Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy - The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith — Same warm, character-driven cozy mystery energy, same deep affection for your fictional found family.
Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy - A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende — A sweeping, beautiful story of survival and enduring love.
Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy
Are You Also Still Sitting With This One?
I finished this book and I’m still grieving fictional people, which, honestly, is the highest compliment I can give a writer. Have you read The Last Devil to Die? Did the ending hit you as hard as it hit me, or are you built different? Drop your thoughts (and your coping mechanisms) in the comments. I genuinely need to debrief.
Book Links:
Want to purchase this or any of your favourite books while supporting a local bookstore? Consider purchasing using the sites below — these sites work with independent local bookstore owners to fulfil your book orders. #SupportLocal
Indiebookstores.ca | Bookshop.org
Goodreads | StoryGraph | Pagebound | Fable | Hardcover | OpenLibrary | Litsy
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