The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman. The first few pages of this book made me think it was going to be a witty, frothy meringue of the "cozy" murder mystery genre; that impression was bolstered when I realized I knew the author from his work on various British quiz shows (which are more about the wit and humor than the quiz). Well, the book is clever, for sure, but it is much more than that. Osman presents an intricately detailed, complex, and multi-layered set of interlocking mysteries, the resolution of which plays out like a clockwork mechanism., and the ending to which is both surprising and inevitable, as Aristotle would have it.
But even more impressive is that the novel is not peopled by the stock characters so common even in well-crafted cozies, but by fully-realized human beings with all the depth and contradiction and doubt and fear and courage that we all carry. But it is still very clever.
A wonderful, rich work that transcends its origins.
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