Book Review: Thursday Murder Club is back with a bullet 

This terrific novel is a welcome addition to Richard Osman’s 'Thursday Murder Club' series

Osman has again displayed his remarkable understanding of people in the latest addition to the Thursday Murder Club family.

• The Bullet That Missed
• Richard Osman
• Viking, €24

With tender precision Osman expertly builds momentum — we’re slowly becoming more familiar with his occasionally exasperating but mostly loveable characters.

It is a leisurely, pleasant process. These characters share a genuine chemistry. The writing is joyful, celebratory, tinged with nostalgia but accepting of the world as it is. There’s a gentleness here, a tolerance of eccentricity and contradiction.

The novel is urbane and elegant, shot through with a delicious dry humour. Osman has a twinkle in his eye, and is clearly enjoying himself hugely. His mannered, perceptive, very English sense of fun is infectious.

He surveys everything with a mixture of fascination and amusement and his sardonic intelligence immediately sets the tone. The novels in this series are his tales of the unexpected. There is improbability, misdirection, confusion, and disquiet.

Crucially though, we never lose the reassuring sense that everything will be alright in the end. In this, the third novel, he has fully hit his stride.

His writing is sleek, assured, and knowing. He knows what is required and has a justified confidence in his ability to deliver.

His plotting, again, is clever, elaborate, mystifying and amusing.

There’s that trademark mischievousness, that dizzying misdirection. Faced with seemingly insuperable problems, the redoubtable ‘gang’ take danger in their stride.

Once again Osman sounds a persistent warning about the foolishness of underestimating or ignoring older people.

These four — Elizabeth, Ibrahim, Joyce, and Ron — are tough, adaptable and resilient. They are realistic and pragmatic.

This is a novel as fascinated by conversation as by action.

The verbal duels here are worth savouring. Osman has created a mannered world in which sinister people behave with elaborate politeness. There’s a hypersensitivity to nuance, to suggestion, to implication in the verbal exchanges. Conversations you would expect to be charged and incoherent are elegant , enigmatic and epigrammatic. Underneath the eloquence there’s always an edge, an agenda, a subtext.

It does appear at times that the novel is wandering aimlessly, but this is not the case. In reality, when things seem to veer towards the quiet and cosy, something deadly invariably happens, something violent and irrevocable.

Osman manipulates the reader very much in the manner of Agatha Christie. He plays with expectations in a similarly covert and clever way.

He also shares her predilection for melodramatic, theatrical denouements. Like Christie, he is keenly aware of the comic and dramatic possibilities of grandiose, florid exposition. He gives the big reveal the respect and ceremony it deserves.

This novel, like the others in the series, is undeniably great fun. It also has a spark of humanity, of empathy, of understanding. It is a thoughtful, emotional book.

As we get deeper into it the glimpses of emotion, the reminders of the past, the pauses for philosophical reflection become more significant. In his unobtrusive, charming way Osman has again displayed his remarkable understanding of people.