Totally devoured this sweet, funny and clever cosy. 100% recommend to anyone wanting something to help them feel a bit better about the world, without it being cloying or overly twee. Am eagerly awaiting the second in the series! ( )

If, after you've read the first few chapters, you are really enjoying this book, I strongly recommend you secure a copy of Book 2 so you can start right in after you've finished this one. The Club's shenanigans begin in 2 immediately after 1 ends.
I personally loved this book. The characters are so engaging and fun, and the banter is delightful. The plot is solid as is the writing.
Read it in one sitting, easily. ( )

The developer of an upscale retirement community is murdered, but luckily this retirement community has a hobby club just for investigating murders. It consists of Ibrahim (a psychiatrist), Ron (a labor union leader), Joyce (a nurse), and Elizabeth (if she told you what her career was she would literally have to kill you). They buddy up to the cops, analyze all the clues, and play senile to uncover whodunnit.

There is a lot here that I liked and some that I didn’t. The writing style is very interesting - very short chapters switch perspective quickly, from main characters to police to victims to minor characters, including first-person diary entries from Joyce. The chapters overlap a lot, showing the same scene from different points of view, which can be annoyingly slow but as the book went on it either happened less or I was less bothered. This is a very expensive retirement community which limits the diversity of the characters, though I did appreciate that several of them are working-class but supported by wealthier children. Ibrahim was noticeably backburnered compared to the other club members; I hope that he will get a bigger role to play in subsequent books.
While it was nice to read about characters who are not the same age one usually reads about, I did not find their elderly antics as cute as it seemed like they were supposed to be, particularly pretending to be senile and the flippant treatment of assisted suicide (I’m in favor of assisted suicide in general, but using it to get out of consequences for a crime is not great, and using it on someone else is just regular murder). The huge quantity of red herrings in the murder investigation was very fun, and I enjoyed the non-murder-related misdirect of the older male cop ending up with the young female cop’s mom instead of the young female cop herself but I really did not like the fatphobic treatment of the older male cop throughout. Overall this genre is still not really for me but I can see the appeal and will probably read at least one more. ( )

THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB was an enjoyable mystery. I loved the cast of characters in the club. A retired psychiatrist, a retired union organizer, a retired spy and a retired nurse make up the membership.

Their activities switch from looking at old cases to a very current murder when the partner of the developer who built their retirement village on the site of an old convent is found bludgeoned to death in his own home with an interesting picture left by the body.

Each of the amateur detectives brings their own skills to solving the case and a few other mysteries along the way including the death of the developer of the village and a cold case they had looked at during a club meeting.

I liked the description of the retirement village with its endless assortment of committees. I also liked the local police who were brought in to work with the amateurs. I liked that that viewpoints switched as the story progressed because it let me learn more about the characters.

I enjoyed that the characters were older people with a lifetime of experiences and problems. ( )

I've given this book three stars, because I can't deny it's well-constructed and well written, often humorous. Four residents in a retirement village have the hobby of returning to unsolved crimes to see if they can make any headway in solving them. And then a real crime comes their way, in their very own community, and they find themselves aiding and abetting the police and often beating them at their own game. It's a clever conceit which somehow failed to engage me, and I shan't be following up this sortie into cosy crime. ( )