We Solve Murders (We Solve Murders, #1)

by Richard Osman

But most communication is by message or email. High-end criminals are much like millennials in that way.

But everyone’s language leaves a unique signature. A particular use of words, a rhythm, a personality. Someone could read an email, and then read a postcard you sent in 2009 and know for a fact they were sent by the same person. Science, you see. So often the enemy of the honest criminal. That’s why ChatGPT has been such a godsend. After writing an email, a text, anything really, you can simply run the whole thing through ChatGPT and it instantly deletes your personality. It flattens you out, irons your creases, washes you away, quirk by quirk, until you disappear.

You can think something often enough, but you will never be prepared for your heart disintegrating.

You can’t have the thrills of life without the pain of life, so Steve has decided to go without the thrills. He chooses to watch the TV, to do his pub quizzes, to help people when he can, but always to return to his armchair with a cat called Trouble.

“You’ve gone from I can’t possibly let you off the island, Rosie to Help me drag a corpse, Rosie ever so quickly you know?”

But Steve has learned you must never resent other people for their happiness. Everyone is taking the best shot they’ve got, and some shots are just luckier than yours. Anytime you feel your unhappiness turning into bitterness, you have to check yourself. You can live with unhappiness, but bitterness will kill you.

Money-smuggling is the biggest business of them all—that’s the first thing you need to understand. Every single illegal activity in the world is made up of two sides. The buyers and the sellers. The sellers offer all sorts of different things: drugs, guns, people, counterfeit clothing, secrets, rare-bird eggs, military-weapons systems. But the buyers, by and large, offer just one thing—money.

And so it goes, that in the sum of the parts of all the illegal activities anywhere in the world, trillions of dollars’ worth of good old-fashioned cash money is just sloshing about, looking for a safe harbor. And, for the most part, that money is nothing but trouble. Have you ever tried paying a million pounds into your local bank branch? Try it. See where that gets you. In the old days they turned a blind eye. A pile of fifties stained with blood? Let me count that for you, sir. But now? Sometimes it’s honestly not worth the bother. Anti-money-laundering laws are a real disincentive to entrepreneurs. Just last week a friend told me she had sighed when being handed a bag containing ten million dollars, dismayed by the thought of the effort and time and expense it would take to clean it all up.

Max has only one rule in life. Keep moving forward and never look back. Or is that two rules? His therapist asked him to think long and hard about whether this was a good tactic. Is it healthy for you, and those around you, the people you work with, the people you love, to only look forward? Max had taken the therapist’s advice. He had a long, hard think about it, before coming to the conclusion that, yes, it was healthy for him, and for those around him. He really does love therapy. It’s even tax-deductible.

“Can I ask why you’re driving a taxi?” Rosie asks Ferdy. “If you’re a politician.” “Because I always lose,” says Ferdy, swerving at the last moment to avoid a concrete truck. “Every time I lose.” Ferdy beeps his horn at a group of young children waving at him from a bright yellow veranda. “They still seem to like you, though,” says Rosie. “That’s because I lose,” says Ferdy. “If I’d won, they’d hate me. That’s politics.”

So theirs was a fairy tale that might not have started with a “Once upon a time,” but they are both confident it will end with a “Happily ever after.”