The Last Devil to Die: The Thursday Murder Club Returns

 

 

The Last Devil to Die (2023)

By Richard Osman

Viking, 349 pages.

★★★★

 

 

 

The Last Devil to Die is the fourth book in the Thursday Murder Club series. Author Richard Osman has pulled a page from successful television shows that develop  characters that audiences adopt as surrogate family members. Each novel stands alone, but somehow the crew at the Cooper’s Chase retirement home seem like quirky British relatives. In brief, the geriatric core four–Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim–bond to solve murders that stump the police. Of course, it helps immensely that Elizabeth was once an important agent in MI6, the U.K. equivalent of the CIA, and has contacts in high places that local police friends Chris and Donna do not have.

 

The Last Devil to Die begins with a diary entry from the mousy, but sneakily ironic Joyce in which she records her wish that the TMC group can take a break from investigating current murders. After all, in a rest home death already occurs with distressing frequency. She pines for her deceased husband Gerry, Elizabeth’s husband Stephen is slowly fading from dementia, Ron and his ex-wife Pauline have an on/off relationship, and nobody quite knows why Ibrahim is alone. Loneliness has lured a new resident into a money-bilking scam that he insists involves true love. Will this be the only nut the Club has to crack? Of course not! One of Stephen’s friends, 80-year-old Brighton antiques dealer Kuldesh Sharma is the premature corpse. Who would wish to harm a man who is already in the twilight of his life? Who indeed? And why would Jill Regan, a high-up muckety-muck with the National Crime Agency assume command of the investigation and order Chris and Donna off the case?

 

Maybe Connie Johnson, who the TMC helped send to prison can shed light. Ibrahim, a psychologist, has been counseling her, if that is the right word. Connie, like “Ib,” is brilliant and the two like to play cat-and-mouse psych-out games. Plus, Connie still operates the East Sussex cocaine trade from her prison cell. The TMC just wants to solve Kuldesh’s murder and she knows the underworld ropes. The quirks of the seasoned protagonists is a constant source of humor and a nice counterpoint to themes of bloodshed and skullduggery. Plus, not everyone at Cooper’s Chase was entirely on the up and up before they arrived. Ron was a bust-a-few-heads union activist and you certainly don’t want to ask too many questions about the doings of their younger Polish friend Bogan, including Joyce’s nosey queries about his relationship with Donna. 

 

Osman spins a tale that involves a conflict between rival heroin kingpins Mitch Maxwell and Luca Buttaci over a recent shipment that has gone missing. This is baffling as the street value of £100,000 is chump change for guys such as they. There’s no rational reason for them to bother with an octogenarian antiques shopkeeper. As Connie observes, even crooks have a code of honor and they don’t eliminate those who are not in “the trade.” Solving the case hinges on questions involving the location of Kuldesh’s phone, who he might have called and, of course, the location of the smack. It will also involve “Computer Bob” Whittaker from Cooper’s Chase, an art forger, her burly Canadian husband, a grifter, a Canterbury professor, transnational intrigue, an escalating body count, a mysterious woman who happens to be in the area where blood is spilled, lots of misdirection, some which-side-are-you-on thugs, and more. Even the title is wrapped in mystery in that it means what you think and what you don’t!

 

Another twist is that we see Joyce assert herself in ways that go beyond what we’ve come to expect of a woman who’d rather bake than be unpleasant. Her acerbic wit is on display, but also planning skills usually left to Elizabeth, who is preoccupied. There’s also a touching revelation about Ibrahim. What is truly unexpected is the late-in-the-book switch to a touching and bittersweet tone that twangs the old heartstrings and invokes the writings of Fredrik Backman. It, as the expression goes, puts a lot of things in perspective, especially the lust for money at the expense of true accounting. Osman’s mix of humor, tragedy, and introspection is a winning formula. Rest assured, he has plans to take us back to Cooper’s Chase in the near future.

 

Rob Weir