The Bullet That Missed: (The Thursday Murder Club 3)

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Ron reaches out to longtime master criminal Jack Mason, who in old age has become a lonely soul after learning the hard way that “your henchmen are not real friends. I'd love one of those books that's a caper around the world, but that also has some truth about the world, and also makes you laugh and has also has some of the aesthetic of Thursday Murder Club, but it's Da Vinci Code. But unlike most crime novelists, he ensures his book’s strength and momentum stem not from its plot or its thrills but rather its perfectly formed characters. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron meet once a week in the Jigsaw Room of Coopers Chase, their plush English retirement village, to investigate unsolved crimes and identify those who got away with murder.

Kuldesh’s murder kickstarts an Elmore Leonard-esque caper plot in which various ­interested ­parties compete to get their hands on a consignment of heroin that had been in his care, resulting in a string of violent deaths alternating with comic set-pieces.This storyline marks the series’s transition from quietly poignant to deeply moving, with Osman giving us some of his best writing yet as Elizabeth’s ­situation prompts the other Club members to reflect on their own griefs and lost loves, with one ­character disclosing some sad secrets.

In previous books, her husband Stephen had been able to play some part in the adventures despite being in the early stages of dementia, but he has now reached the stage of being only intermittently able to ­recognise her. On this outing, the “four harmless pensioners” turn their attention to the case of Bethany Waites, a television reporter who, one night 10 years ago, while investigating a massive tax fraud operation, was in a car that went over a cliff. But the formula is fiendishly clever: four senior-citizen friends living in a Kent retirement community have decided to eschew the usual 5,000-piece jigsaws to pool their intelligence and solve murders. Opening the new Osman is like sitting down to dinner with treasured friends you know are going to kill you - deliciously! With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out?The joy of writing this, is dark things happen in these books, but you can always talk about daytime TV and cakes. It’s this self-awareness that grounds Osman’s characters, and makes us look forward to seeing them again. And former trades union official Ron continues to fight doggedly for justice — or at least as much as his bad knee will allow.

The foursome’s cosy relationship with the local Fairhaven police detectives – young Donna and her boss, Chris – is now established as a firm friendship; the wonderfully buff Polish handyman Bogdan is likewise reliably on hand. Two years ago, Richard Osman’s “ The Thursday Murder Club” introduced four unlikely, yet immensely likable, amateur detectives. The plot introduces some new bad people: a local teenage thug; a tough-nut female drug dealer who (helpfully) goes weak at the knees around Bogdan; a high-level underworld “middle man” from whom mafia diamonds have been stolen on impulse by a raffish ex-husband of Elizabeth’s.

But when a local builder turns up dead, the 70-something sleuths find themselves grappling with their first live case — one with “a real corpse, and somewhere out there, a real killer. Naturally, however, Osman doesn’t miss an opportunity for comedy, and with Elizabeth ­occupied elsewhere, the mild-mannered Joyce – surely Osman’s finest creation – makes an effort to channel Elizabeth’s acerbity and imperturbability as she and her pals hunt Kuldesh’s killer. It helps that their leader, Elizabeth Best, is ex-secret service, and is always having hilarious flashbacks to East Berlin in 1970. This book does fall down a bit when it comes to the plot: Osman has proved a decent enough plotter in the past, but I suspect a couple of major reveals here will have been foreseen by most readers a few hundred pages in advance.

If you are happy to let other pens dwell on guilt and misery, you can relax and enjoy this novel, which is superbly entertaining. The new book wastes no time allowing time to pass, which is sensible, yet we feel that things have moved on.

I managed to steel myself to all the Twixes, but the throwaway reference to chocolate fingers on p284 nearly broke me. Even when an armed and angry New York mafioso turns up, no reader need worry that Joyce or Elizabeth will accidentally receive a fatal crossfire bullet to the head. It’s to Osman’s credit, ­however, that now that the world has fallen in love with his septuagenarian sleuths, he’s starting to allow the harsher realities of old age to bite them.