The Bullet That Missed (Thursday Murder Club, #3)

by Richard Osman

The door opens once more, and Elizabeth enters the room. The gang is all here. Ron pretends he is not touched. Last time he had a gang of friends like these, they were being hospitalized by police riot shields at the Wapping print-workers’ strike. Happy days.

Plan for success, her mum used to say, although soon afterward she died, having been hit by an uninsured van.

“I had read you were a Buddhist, Mike?” Ibrahim spent the morning researching their guest. “I am,” says Mike. “Thirty-odd years.” “Ah,” says Ibrahim. “I had been under the impression that Buddhists were vegetarian? I was almost sure.” “I’m Church of England too,” says Mike. “So I pick and choose. That’s the point of being a Buddhist.”

“Fighting is mainly hiding. It’s good to learn that early.”

“What’s your favorite book ever?” “The Velveteen Rabbit,” says Bogdan. “Or Andre Agassi’s autobiography.”

throws her arm across his endless chest. Rarely has she felt so thrillingly puny.

He eats so much broccoli he can spell it without looking it up.

Very few things are so important you would risk your life for them, but all sorts of things are important enough to risk somebody else’s life.

They are both silent for a minute. “I love you, Elizabeth.” “Don’t be so sentimental, Stephen.” “Well, either way, there’s never a dull moment,” says Stephen.

“If murder were easy, none of us would survive Christmas.”

“We all go at some point, my Viking friend. I’d rather she wasn’t killed by a cowardly Swede, but best to bow out doing something decent. I’m sure I’d miss her, but someone else would turn up soon enough. Beautiful spies everywhere you look. Falling out of trees.”

“Google says three hours and forty-five minutes. So I will be there in two hours and thirty-eight minutes.”

They gave a caller a thousand pounds for knowing the capital of France. And there were three options.

that’s how bullies start. One minute it’s “nobody likes you,” the next you are being pushed off a cliff.

“You landed on your feet there, what a fella. I’d climb him like a tree.”

I never kill anyone,” says Viktor. “Honestly, once you start, that’s it, you have to keep killing.” “That’s like lip salve,” says Pauline. “Once you start using it, your lips dry out, and so you have to keep using it.”

It was a first edition of Wind in the Willows that gave you away.”