Things have been hectic for the Thursday Murder Club, the group of senior sleuths who operate out of an English retirement village in Richard Osman’s entertaining series. In the past few years the club’s members — the former nurse Joyce, the practicing psychiatrist Ibrahim, the ex-labor firebrand Ron, and the undisputed leader (and retired MI6 agent) Elizabeth — have done little but apprehend killers.
As Christmas comes and goes near the start of the group’s fourth outing, “The Last Devil to Die,” a somewhat beleaguered Joyce joins her daughter in a hopeful toast: “No murders next year.” Alas, a new victim soon comes to the group’s urgent attention.
Mr. Osman’s readers first met Kuldesh Sharma, an antiques dealer from Brighton, during a previous case. Now Kuldesh has been shot in the head and killed, his shop ransacked as if the assailant were searching for something. That something turns out to be a shipment of heroin, smuggled into the country in an old box, and left at Kuldesh’s shop to be collected later. The club stakes out the industrial hangar of the area’s largest drug lord. “I run a legitimate logistics company,” this trafficker insists. “And I’m a harmless pensioner,” Elizabeth responds. “But you’ve got a gun in your bag [that’s] badly hidden,” the man objects. “I’m not hiding it,” says Elizabeth.
The friends encounter more dealers and wannabes, and further murders occur. The hard-nosed Elizabeth has a pragmatic plan to narrow the suspect pool: “Let’s see who kills whom next.” But even as she ponders a small drug war, Elizabeth is more occupied with a different sort of desperate case: the advancing Alzheimer’s of her husband, Stephen.
Mr. Osman renders the scenes with Stephen, his wife, and others in a manner both heartbreaking and heartwarming. The sensitivity with which the clubmates treat Stephen informs their investigation. “Days of death, ” Joyce reflects, “are days when we weigh our relationship with love in our bare hands.” There may be other aged detectives in print and on television, but for wit, intelligence and humanity, the Thursday Murder Club outranks them all.
In Ann Cleeves’s “The Raging Storm,” Detective Inspector Matthew Venn is summoned to investigate a bizarre homicide in Greystone, an isolated English village on the coast of Devon. Fierce weather batters its rocky surroundings, and long-term residents are suspicious of outsiders. “The whole of Greystone had a strange, unreal, almost other worldly quality,” thinks Venn’s sergeant.
The spookiest spot in Greystone is Scully Cove, a treacherous place feared by superstitious sailors and landlubbers alike. It’s here that lifeboat workers, out at night in a raging gale, found the corpse of Jeremy Rosco, dumped in a dinghy anchored in the sea. Rosco, a not-so-favorite son of Greystone, had left the village early and found quick fame as “the youngest person to sail round the world single-handed.” Decades of global adventures, documentary series and lucrative endorsements followed. Once the living legend made a low-profile return to Greystone, it was only a few weeks before his body was found — naked, stabbed and seemingly on display.
Venn grew up near Greystone and often visited the village, which was (and is) a stronghold of the Rapture-anticipating Christian community in which his parents raised him. The detective, a gay married man no longer in the church, is well acquainted with the area’s insular nature. Local police are rarely called to the village. “I get the impression,” one cop tells Venn, “that they sort out their own problems.”
While the inspector’s crew collects evidence and checks alibis, Venn digs deep into the histories of the victim and all those with whom he’d been in contact. He becomes certain that Rosco’s murder, along with other crimes that follow, have deep roots in this close-knit community’s shadowy past. One might wish that Ms. Cleeves made more use of her setting’s meteorological and metaphorical potential, but she tells a captivating story nonetheless.
Mick Herron, the author of the popular Slough House series of English spy novels (adapted for television as “Slow Horses”), gives readers a special treat with “The Secret Hours,” a standalone adventure that turns on a problematic operation by English agents in Berlin in 1994.
The book begins in the present, as intruders break into the Devon cottage of a 63-year-old retired academic, Max Janacek — an inactive spy’s cover identity — who flees into the rural night. Abandoning house and car, Janacek sneaks into London to find out who’s pursuing him and why. It’s no coincidence that a moribund official inquiry into abuses committed by the nation’s espionage service has sprung to life with the receipt of a top-secret file on that hushed-up Berlin escapade.
Mr. Herron’s narrative moves with ease between present and past, England and Germany, action and satire, propelled by prescient commentary on the passage of time: “The present wins every battle,” the author writes, “but the past always wins the war.” Out of the treacherous spy-world bureaucracy emerge two would-be heroes: Griselda Fleet, a woman determined to do her job as a civil servant, and Malcolm Kyle, her fussy colleague in search of the courage to speak truth to power.
It’s a pleasure to watch these two work to determine what went wrong in Berlin and uncover the misdeeds that the Whitehall establishment would rather keep hidden. The duo may be a lot sharper than Mr. Herron’s bumbling slow horses, but they still manage to go seriously awry in the course of their investigation. “The Secret Hours” culminates in an astonishing denouement that should startle even the savviest spy-fiction fan.
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