2021
The Man Who Died Twice
MW
Four retirees in a peaceful English retirement village meet every Thursday to solve cold cases — until a real murder lands on their doorstep.
In the upscale Coopers Chase retirement village in Kent, four unlikely friends — former spy Elizabeth, ex-nurse and diarist Joyce, retired psychiatrist Ibrahim, and one-time union firebrand Ron — gather every Thursday to pore over unsolved murder files. It's a hobby. Until the village's brash property developer is found dead, and suddenly the club has a live case.
What follows is a mystery that keeps folding in on itself: old bones turn up where they shouldn't, the body count rises, and the local police — patient DCI Chris Hudson and ambitious PC Donna De Freitas — find themselves reluctantly (then not so reluctantly) teaming up with four pensioners who are far more capable, and far more devious, than anyone expects.
Osman's trick is balancing a properly twisty plot with real tenderness about aging, grief, and friendship. Joyce's diary entries alone are worth the price of admission, and the book earns its emotional beats without ever losing its comic timing.
Yes — it's one of the best entry points into modern cozy crime, and the start of a series that has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide.
It isn't flawless. The plot juggles a lot of suspects and a few threads resolve more through confession than deduction, which can frustrate readers who want a strictly fair-play puzzle. The pacing meanders in the middle, and the large cast of village characters takes some tracking. But the voice, the humor, and the four leads are so winning that most readers forgive the untidiness — and the series only gets more confident from here.
Yes. Netflix released a feature film adaptation in 2025, directed by Chris Columbus, with a genuinely stacked cast: Helen Mirren as Elizabeth, Pierce Brosnan as Ron, Ben Kingsley as Ibrahim, and Celia Imrie as Joyce. It's a breezy, affectionate take on the book — condensed, as film adaptations always are — and a fine companion piece, but the novel's charm lives in Joyce's diary entries and Osman's narration, so read it first if you can.
Yes, ideally. Each mystery is self-contained, but the character arcs — especially Elizabeth's past and the club members' personal lives — build from book to book, and later books freely spoil earlier ones. Start with The Thursday Murder Club (2020) and read in publication order.
Five so far: The Thursday Murder Club (2020), The Man Who Died Twice (2021), The Bullet That Missed (2022), The Last Devil to Die (2023), and The Impossible Fortune (2025). Osman also writes a separate series, We Solve Murders, which is unrelated.
Yes — no graphic violence, no gore, plenty of humor. That said, it's a cozy with unexpected emotional depth: it deals honestly with aging, dementia, and loss, so it hits harder than the cheerful cover suggests.
Broadly, yes — the 2025 film keeps the setting, the four leads, and the spine of the mystery, though it streamlines subplots and trims the supporting cast. The book gives you much more of Joyce's diary and the club's inner lives, so most fans recommend reading first.
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