A New Kind of Hobby

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

Pages: 382 Genre: mystery

Rating: 3.5 Star

Kindle Notes & Highlights

In this peaceful retirement community, four friends gather every Thursday to discuss murders past. And when a murder occurs right on their doorstep one day, they couldn't be more excited. They finally get a chance to put their skills to the test.

Full disclosure, I was reading this book quickly when I was far too busy to be trying to finish it, so I don't know how properly informed my opinion is.

I did enjoy this book. The writing style reminded me of Benjamin Stevenson, of whom I am a huge fan, and the characters were so fun. While I didn't love everything, and the story got a little confusing, I had a lot of fun reading this book.

The ending was pretty solid, as it wrapped up all the details really well, but the journey getting there got very muddled. The main motives for the murder always gave the impression of being a side plot, which made it hard to follow. We were introduced to a lot of people, too, but I didn't mind that so much. I knew most of them wouldn't be relevant — unfortunately, though, I don't think our main characters were relevant enough. It was just a lot to keep straight.

I loved the writing style, though. Some chapters were "written" by one of our retirees, Joyce, but most was third person omniscient among a variety of people. For everyone, the narration was so witty and clever that the experience of reading was fun regardless of how much I was enjoying the content itself. The only thing I didn't enjoy was whenever Detective Chris would have a chapter. Compared to the others, his was so negative and genuinely degrading that it took some of the fun out of it.

While I did like Joyce, I was confused why she got special treatment. I don't know that her journal entries added anything narratively that couldn't have been included in the normal style, and there was nothing else like her diary that was included. It made me more familiar with her, which was nice, but I never really understood why she was chosen to be our obvious entry point.

Overall, this was a fun book, and I'm excited to read on. Also, I believe it's going to be a Netflix show, which I expect will be very good.