Books Like
Books Like The Thursday Murder Club
Richard Osman's cosy mystery sensation features four retirement-home residents solving cold cases with more wit than any detective half their age. These 12 novels deliver the same warmth, clever plotting, and characters whose life experience makes them impossible to underestimate.
What makes The Thursday Murder Club special isn't the murders — it's the people. Joyce with her diary entries. Ron's radical past. Ibrahim's precise psychiatric mind. Elizabeth, who clearly has government secrets she'll take to her grave. Osman built a cosy mystery around the radical premise that people in their seventies are the most interesting people in the room.
The books below share at least one of those qualities: amateur investigators with specialist knowledge, wit that doesn't come at the expense of genuine emotion, mysteries that function as social comedy, or the specific pleasure of watching someone be badly underestimated.
If You Love the Wit and Warmth
01
A Great Deliverance
British Mystery
Inspector Lynley and Sergeant Havers are an odd-couple pairing — aristocrat and working-class — solving a grim Yorkshire murder. George writes British social comedy as well as she writes murder, and Havers is one of the great characters in crime fiction.
02
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
Cosy Mystery
Precious Ramotswe sets up Botswana's first female detective agency and solves cases using common sense, empathy, and a deep knowledge of human nature. Warm, funny, quietly philosophical. If you want more Thursday Murder Club energy, start here.
03
A Morbid Taste for Bones
Medieval Cosy
Brother Cadfael, a Benedictine monk with a colourful past, applies hard-won worldly knowledge to twelfth-century crimes. The original amateur sleuth whose life experience makes him the smartest person in any room. Twenty volumes of comfort reading.
04
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
Cosy Mystery
Eleven-year-old Flavia de Luce is a chemistry genius who discovers a dead man in her family's garden and decides to investigate. Funny, eccentric, and narrated with a voice unlike anything else in crime fiction. Eight books in the series.
If You Want Amateur Sleuths with a Skill Set
05
The Beekeeper's Apprentice
Historical Mystery
A fifteen-year-old girl who is arguably smarter than Sherlock Holmes becomes his apprentice. King takes the Holmes mythology and does something genuinely new with it — Mary Russell is the equal partner, not the assistant.
06
Still Life
Literary Cozy
Chief Inspector Gamache investigates a death in the idyllic Quebec village of Three Pines. The village itself is a character — populated by artists, eccentrics, and people with carefully buried secrets. The best mystery series of the past two decades.
07
The Cuckoo's Calling
British Crime
Cormoran Strike — a veteran with a prosthetic leg and a near-mythically bad personal life — investigates a supermodel's apparent suicide. J.K. Rowling writing under a pseudonym. Grittier than Thursday Murder Club but with the same attention to character.
08
Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories
Classic Cozy
The original amateur sleuth who gets underestimated at every crime scene. If you love Elizabeth from Thursday Murder Club — a woman who is clearly much more than she appears — you are already a Miss Marple reader who hasn't discovered it yet.
If You Want the Social Comedy Angle
09
Alexander McCall Smith's 44 Scotland Street
Comic Novel
Serial fiction originally published in The Scotsman about residents of an Edinburgh New Town flat. Less mystery, more warm social comedy about the overlapping lives of people who happen to share a stairwell. Irresistible.
10
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
Comic Fiction
A retired British Army major in a small English village navigates rural small-mindedness, class, and an unexpected friendship with a Pakistani shopkeeper. Osman readers will feel immediately at home.
11
The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
Comic Adventure
An elderly man escapes his nursing home on his hundredth birthday and accidentally becomes entangled with criminals, a suitcase full of money, and a series of events that mirror his improbable twentieth-century history. Warm, funny, and completely mad.
12
The Rosie Project
Romantic Comedy
A genetics professor with undiagnosed autism devises a scientifically rigorous Wife Project to find a suitable partner. Ends up with Rosie, who satisfies none of his criteria. The same warmth and gentle social comedy as Osman's series.
Common Questions
As of 2026 there are four books: The Thursday Murder Club (2020), The Man Who Died Twice (2021), The Bullet That Missed (2022), and The Last Devil to Die (2023). A fifth book has been announced.
Publication order is recommended — each book develops the characters and their relationships. Start with The Thursday Murder Club, then The Man Who Died Twice, The Bullet That Missed, and The Last Devil to Die.
Yes — it's a 'cosy' mystery, meaning the violence is minimal and off-page. It's appropriate for readers 13 and up, though the humour and cultural references will resonate most with adult readers.