We Solve Murders: The Start of a New Series?

 

 

 

We Solve Murders (2024)

By Richard Osman

Viking, 381 pages.

★★★★

 

If you’ve been a fan of the Thursday Murder Club novels of Richard Osman, his We Solve Murders has all the earmarks of being the kickoff of a new series. If it is indeed the start—and let’s face it the Murder Club cast is aging out, as it were—you will need to adjust to the fact that thus far the new cast isn’t as adorable as the old one yet. But don’t despair, there’s still a lot of British eccentricity on the pages.

 

Steve Wheeler is a retired cop in Axley whose sole ambition is to wear his vintage rock shirts and loaf away his days. Axley is an invented English village that represents a safe retreat for Wheeler. Steve’s wife Debbie was killed in a train crash years ago, but he still “talks” to her every night. Axley also represents self-imposed isolation. Steve is still in his 50s, but his “activities” are limited to arguing with his pub mates over road routes and taking part in quiz games. His daughter-in-law Amy tries her best to persuade Steve to expand his interests, but he’s not buying it. She runs her own personal protection business to get out of the house because hubby Adam is away on business a lot. Don’t think desk job. Amy is a 5’6” dynamo and woe betide anyone who thinks she’s a pushover. They can contemplate what wrong from a hospital bed! As it happens, Amy and Steve are best buddies, even though she’s all action and he’s trying to be no-action. Amy loves her husband, but neither she nor Steve are cut out for Adam’s business world.

 

Enter Rosie D’Antonio, a famous author living off her reputation. She is classic fading diva who puts the moves on everyone she meets. She has the feeling she is being stalked and hires Amy to investigate and protect her. Amy is reluctant to take the job because she thinks Rosie is imagining things. Maybe. Maybe not. Osman brings us up to the moment with characters using ChatGPT for various reasons.

 

Francois Loubert uses ChatGPT to send impersonal emails because it is hard to trace his IP address and it leaves very few clues of his real identity. As a money smuggler, he has reasons to be incognito. ChatGPT is hard to crack, but not impossible. As Amy investigates, she gets close enough that Loubert or a mysterious “Joe Blow” hires assassins to eliminate her. That’s easier to imagine than to accomplish, but she takes enough lumps that Steve is convinced to join the investigation. After all, he’s much closer to her than he is to his son Adam.  The botched hits are amusing, even when they are gruesome failures.

 

It might be easier to crack were there but one ChatGPT trail and only one connected to Rosie. Osman constructs a convoluted plot. Jeff Nolan is the CEO of Maximum Import Solutions who’d like to know why three of his clients were killed. Is his former partner Henk involved? Is he Loubert? Who is writing emails “in the style of an English gentleman?” Who is “Joe Blow?” Amy and Steve find themselves on a round-the-world trip that begins in England and touches down in South Carolina, Dubai, St. Lucia, Ireland, Fiji, Hawaii, and back in the UK. Sometimes it’s a literal “touch” down.  Amy is as wily as she is wiry. She charms private airport passport control agent Carlos into helping her deceive one pursuer. Among the offbeat characters she and/or Steve meet include dumb-as-an-ox actor Max Highfield; Nolan’s steely secretary Susan Knox, the keeper of company contracts and history; Mickey, a loud-mouthed but laid-back Texan golfer; and Eddie, a fanboy.

 

Do Steve and Amy solve the various mysteries? Given that the two set up a new agency titled We Solve Mysteries, you can rest assured they save their own hides. That doesn’t mean they are always right; after all, Osman’s goal is to entertain, not be Sherlock Holmes. Given the number of loose threads in the plot, Osman wisely avoids any sort of all-roads-lead-to-Rome solution that ties everything together. Sigmund Freud likely never said “sometimes a cigar is just a cigar,” but that adage holds true. Osman gives us an unlikely pairing of a failed retiree and his daughter-in-law, and if that’s not a series setup, I’ll retire my deerstalker cap.

 

Rob Weir