The Thursday Murder Club

I like small town stories. They're usually engaging, very descriptive, and are overall very enjoyable to read. Unfortunately, I can't say the same about Osman's book. The premise about being set in a really nice retirement village in England paints a beautiful picture in the head, but the book is let down massively by the way Osman chooses to tell the story.

First of all, there is the fact that Osman has chosen a very weird writing style that makes it hard to immerse oneself into the book - most of it is told in first person present tense. But sometimes, mid-paragraph, it switches randomly to first person past tense. There are certain chapters that are diary entries of one of the many characters in the book, and this is written in first person past tense. However, when chapters focus on other characters, this is written in first person present tense, often switching between present continuous, present perfect, present conditional, or simple present. It made me reread sentences oftentimes, making me lose out the context of the rest of the paragraph, and slowly waning my interest in getting to know the full story.

Then there is the fact that most of the chapters are short. I found one chapter that was literally only one sentence...why?! Short chapters are fine, but wouldn't it have been a better choice to simply make use of scene breaks if the entire purpose was to switch between different characters' points of views?

Osman also felt the need to introduce many different characters. In fact, the very first few sentences of the book introduces you to 2 different characters! There was no real attempt at world building whatsoever. There are very many characters, but there's so little depth or character building for all of them that you never connect with any of them. It's hard to get sucked into a book when you can't root for, or relate to any of the characters.

The title of the book has the word “murder club” in it. We are introduced to 3 different murders throughout the course of the book - and the murder that you'd think was the main one and the pivotal point of the whole story remains unsolved even at the end of the book. The murder club has its version of events, and the police have their own version of events. And then, another new randomly introduced character that previously we were never even introduced to, or had point of views from, gets to know that actual story behind the murder, but this isn't passed on to the police or the murder club.

Osman dives into so many subplots that it makes it hard to keep track of the main plot. I think Osman himself encountered this, because the above resolution to the main murder seems to have been added at the last moment, as Osman's editor was going over the draft and realised that Osman had forgotten to add a real end to the main plot of the book.

Overall, this is a book I'd not read again, and is a book that took me a long while to complete mainly because of the very non-compelling style of story and story telling.