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

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The minutiae of people's lives, which is actually what we spend most of the time on, is very present in these books.

An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing. Another show-stopper from Richard Osman and a must-read for fans of the Thursday Murder Club and The Man Who Died Twice. 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. 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. He is a much-loved TV personality whose company is enjoyed by an enormous number of people, many of whom chuckle “You’re absolutely right, Richard” at least 17 times a week.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. It helps that their leader, Elizabeth Best, is ex-secret service, and is always having hilarious flashbacks to East Berlin in 1970.

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. The joy of writing this, is dark things happen in these books, but you can always talk about daytime TV and cakes. Richard Osman’s first three Thursday Murder Club mysteries are among the 10 bestselling hardback novels since UK records began; I ­suspect only nuclear armageddon or an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant plague can prevent this fourth entry in the series from muscling onto the list. Opening the new Osman is like sitting down to dinner with treasured friends you know are going to kill you - deliciously!Osman has taken the trouble to work out that many of us are old, and that many more of us are reluctantly aware that we will become old in the blink of an eye; his putting the elderly centre-stage is an obvious idea that seems, in today’s climate, revolutionary.

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. Clearly no other novelist ­working today can come up with anything to match the pleasure of spending time with Joyce, Elizabeth, Ibrahim and Ron as they pore over the details of unsolved murders in the Jigsaw room at Coopers Chase retirement village. However, every now and then, Osman offsets the frivolity with pathos, not least when Elizabeth watches her husband, Stephen, slide further into the dark depths of dementia. If there is fault to be found, it is a recurring one throughout the series — namely that Osman’s two men have less to do than his two women, and as a result feel like extras around the main double-act.

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. With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? I managed to steel myself to all the Twixes, but the throwaway reference to chocolate fingers on p284 nearly broke me. Osman’s debut novel was a publishing phenomenon: It sold millions, and Steven Spielberg snapped up the film rights.