7 Books to Read After The Thursday Murder Club
What Thursday Murder Club does that most mysteries don't: it makes you care about the people before it makes you care about the puzzle. The deaths matter because the living people matter. These 7 books understand that.
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Book 2. A man Elizabeth knew in her spy days turns up at Coopers Chase claiming someone is after him for $20 million in stolen diamonds — and then turns up dead.
If you haven't read book 2 yet, start here. The ensemble deepens, the jokes get better, and the emotional gut-punch at the end is earned in a way that only Osman seems to manage.
Chief Inspector Armand Gamache investigates a death in Three Pines, a tiny Quebec village where everyone knows everyone — and someone knows more than they're saying.
The literary version of Thursday Murder Club: a detective series built around a specific community, warm but never cosy, funny but never silly. If you want more of the human texture, start with Still Life.
A literary editor receives the manuscript of the latest book from her most successful crime author — and finds a murder mystery hidden inside the fiction.
For readers who love mysteries that know they're mysteries. Osman has said Horowitz is one of his key influences. The structural playfulness is irresistible.
Queen Elizabeth II accidentally discovers the London Library's mobile van and becomes an obsessive reader. A very thin novella, enormously funny, and surprisingly moving.
Not a mystery, but it shares everything else with Thursday Murder Club: British wit, older protagonists who refuse to be defined by their age, and prose that looks simple until you notice how perfectly calibrated it is.
Inspector Thomas Lynley is sent to Yorkshire to investigate the apparent murder of a farmer by his daughter — who confessed immediately and refuses to explain why.
For readers who want the British setting and puzzle-solving but at greater psychological depth. George's Inspector Lynley series is twenty books of superbly constructed crime fiction.
Constable Hamish Macbeth polices a remote Scottish Highlands village with more eccentricity than ambition — and keeps stumbling into murders he'd rather not investigate.
The Scottish village version of Coopers Chase: a closed community, a reluctant detective, and gentle warmth around the edges of real crime. M.C. Beaton's signature charm translates perfectly.
Two trainee lawyers are tasked with reading through a pile of emails from an amateur theatre group to identify who murdered one of their members. The clues are all in the correspondence.
For readers who loved the Thursday Murder Club's comedy and the pleasure of watching clever people make assumptions that turn out to be wrong. The format is brilliantly original.