Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim – the core members of Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club, and as another resident at their Coopers Chase retirement village puts it, the “cool kids” on the block – are back for a fourth outing in The Last Devil to Die (Viking). This time, they’re hoping for “a new project that moved at a gentler pace than usual. Something a bit less murdery”, perhaps. But Osman doesn’t disappoint: before long, Kuldesh, an old friend in the antiques business, has met his maker, and the gang are on the trail of a heroin importation hub and a killer. Everything is here that fans of the series have come to expect: humour, warmth, the confounding of expectations as these pensioners investigate. There’s also a deeper insight into the character of Ibrahim, who is fast becoming my favourite (sorry Joyce) – for his mission to have the Thursday Murder Club become carbon-neutral by 2030, if he could only stop laminating everything, and his past. Along with the laughs, there is grief, and an ending that is handled sensitively (I was weeping). Osman is writing something new next, about a “father-in-law-daughter-in-law detective duo”, he tells us in his acknowledgments, but he promises that the gang “will also be sticking around for a long time to come”. Thank goodness: we all need a regular injection of the Thursday Murder Club to keep our spirits up.
A rather less savoury pair of pensioners grace the pages of Stephen King’s Holly(Hodder & Stoughton), another instalment in the adventures of detective Holly Gibney, who first appeared in his Bill Hodges trilogy, and, says King, “stole my heart”. The book is set in Covid times, and Holly’s partner, Pete, is ill and quarantining. Her mother, Charlotte, an avid Trump supporter, has just died. Holly’s mourning this loss and picking over their complicated relationship, when Penelope Dahl gets in touch to ask for help with the disappearance of her daughter, Bonnie. Almost against her will, Holly gets involved: “Pete says she’ll get used to clients’ tales of woe eventually, that her heart will grow calluses, but it hasn’t happened yet, and Holly hopes it never does.” Holly’s investigations, however, form only part of this novel; King is also laying bare the nefarious activities of a pair of elderly academics, Rodney and Emily Harris, who are involved in luring passersby into a van, drugging them and locking them in a cage in their basement. Their purposes are very dark indeed – will Holly and her friends crack this case? Nail-biting and disturbing, it turns into a helter-skelter race to the finish line.
Mick Herron’s new standalone thriller, The Secret Hours (Baskerville), opens with one hell of a chase scene, as former spook Max, now in his 60s, is woken by someone climbing through his kitchen window and runs for his life into the Devon night. “Thirty seconds in the dark could make up a small lifetime. That much he remembered from the long ago, a memory awake now in his bones.”
The pace then slows considerably, as we learn about the Monochrome inquiry, set up to investigate “historical over-reaching by the intelligence services”. The civil servants Griselda Fleet and Malcolm Kyle (“by his own reckoning the second-highest achiever of his year’s intake”) are seconded to this toothless investigation, which is “announced with less fanfare than the then PM’s mini-break at Peppa Pig World”; Herron has a lot of fun enumerating the hopeless, irrelevant witnesses they call. But then Malcom is slipped a file that threatens to blow the lid on secrets from Berlin in the 1990s, and he and Griselda have to decide what to do – and what these revelations might do to their careers.
The Secret Hours has all of Herron’s tight plotting and characteristically low-key humour (“They couldn’t sack you. It was called the civil service for a reason, and sacking you would be the height of ill manners”). It’s an excellent standalone, but fans of his Slough House books would do well to pick it up too.
Detective Matthew Venn, the latest creation from Ann Cleeves, author of the Shetland and Vera Stanhope series, is back in The Raging Storm (Macmillan), and investigating the death of a celebrity adventurer, Jem Rosco, in the small Devon town of Greystone. Rosco’s body has been found by the lifeboat crew in a dinghy during a storm, and as Venn and his team investigate, they find it hard to get a purchase on the case. This is a remote community that “policed itself”, where superstition still stalks the streets. As ever, this is a carefully plotted crime novel from Cleeves, with the sea and the raging weather adding an extra thrill to an intriguing mystery. Venn, with the religious past he walked away from, is an excellent addition to her stable of detectives.
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