So, this is another Audible book that my sister bought that I get to enjoy. Thankfully she bought all three, so I get to listen to them all! This is book one.
The premise of this this book was totally new and refreshing to me. The closest parallel I can make is to the Netflix show “Only Murders in the Building.” It’s kind of a loose parallel though. Anyway, we get pulled in immediately as Elizabeth, an octogenarian asks her friend Joyce, a former nurse how long it would take for a woman to bleed out after a stabbing. The nonchalant way she asks her though sets the tone for the book.
We eventually meet the Thursday Murder Club, so aptly named because on Thursdays, they meet in the “jigsaw puzzle room” at their senior apartment complex to talk about unsolved murders. Holy crap I love these people. They’re each fully fleshed out characters with their own motives, interests, and personality quirks.
First are the four club members, who are all pushing eighty… Elizabeth is a former spy with a husband who’s starting the slippery slope into dementia. She’s terrified of losing him. She also has a friend in the senior nursing home nearby. She was a former member of the Thursday Murder Club, and a former cop. She’s in a coma (basically) for the entire book, but she even has a fleshed-out personality! Joyce is a boy-crazy (old man crazy?), kind-hearted baker with a secret stiff spine that comes out sometimes when she needs to be tough. Ron is a former union rabble-rouser with a boxer son. He’s a little prickly, but still loveable. Ibrahim is a former psychologist and is always thinking. He can kind of get into the motives of people because of all his experience.
Then there’s the cops – Donna and Chris. I love them both too, and we see them grow throughout the book. I love how the four seniors have everyone (especially these two) wrapped around their fingers. They get so much information from the cops that they’re super not supposed to have.
This is one of those books that shifts characters every few chapters. Normally that annoys me, because just as you’re getting into something, they switch. I’ve literally never read a book where I wasn’t annoyed that we were switching characters. This annoyance did not happen once in this book. I wanted to know what EVERYONE was doing at every moment. When we moved onto another character, even if it was a cliffhanger from the previous one, I was elated. I can’t recommend this book enough, please read it!