The Last Devil to Die, by Richard Osman

Once again, the latest volume in the Thursday Murder Club series provides everything we’ve come to expect from the earlier volumes: sassy senior citizens taking advantage of the fact that nobody takes them seriously as crime-solvers, a nicely twisty plot which carries on some of the story threads from the previous novels.

Along with the sly humour of this series, there’s always been a little bittersweetness to the main characters’ stories. We know that Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim are smart, capable people who shouldn’t be written off just because they live in a retirement community, but the awareness that they are getting older, accepting physical limitations and the fact that they don’t have endless years stretching ahead of them, is always in the background of the stories. Here it’s much more at the forefront, as a heart-rending plot twist involving a secondary character ties in neatly to the mystery plot, but also reminds us that it’s not just the devils who die … sometimes the good guys do too.