Published in 2022, this is by the redoubtable Richard Osman. It's the third in a series featuring four elderly sleuths (Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim), who live in an upmarket retirement complex, get together to crack cold cases for fun, and regularly find themselves embroiled in distinctly hot cases. The Thursday Murder Club (2020) was the first the series, and The Man Who Died Twice (2021) the second.



This time, the team is investigating the death, 10 years earlier, of journalist Bethany Waites. While she is on the trail of a major VAT fraud, her car goes over a cliff, and she disappears, presumed dead. Running parallel to this story is a threat that is dangled over the head of Elizabeth by a cryptocurrency baron known as the "Viking". He wants her to eliminate one Viktor. This is a former KGB spy (and therefore a counterpart of the dark and shadowy Elizabeth of the past), but he's in the Viking's bad books because he's an investment rival. If Elizabeth doesn't comply, it's her friend Joyce who will be in the crosshairs.

Of these two plotlines, I think the first works, and the second doesn't.

The second is not so much resolved as airbrushed out, while the resolution of the first comes as a surprise (good), but the reveal feels pell-mell and messy (not so good).

And pretty much everyone turns out to be a good guy... Yes, the category is cosy crime, so it's not supposed to be dripping with evil, but this one is more cosy than a cat on an angora sweater...


Yogyakarta, 2013/14. Law and order in another gated community...

The Bullet That Missed is funny, but not quite so sustainedly funny as the previous two. (Things that made me laugh: "In Brighton there's a fair-trade cocaine dealer... Cocaine from family-run farms, no pesticides"; Joyce, searching for information: "I got so desperate I even used Bing"...)

It's also poignant (particularly in its depiction of Stephen's ongoing mental decline, and its affirmation of our need for community), but it's not quite so movingly meditative as the previous two.

Distractingly, the chapters are super-short. Given that I noticed this, in a way that I hadn't on the way through the first two books, I wondered if it was a particular characteristic of this volume. Actually, looking at the reviews for the previous two, I'm not sure there's much difference. But for some reason the jerky brevity this time round was unsettling.

Everyone, it seems, loves Joyce, whose first-person diary entries provide an alternative view on goings-on. But I increasingly find her just the tiniest bit tiresome, and feel I would prefer to be reading Ibrahim's diary.

Oh, and Joyce now has a dog, called Alan. He is supposed to be cute, but I am utterly immune to canine charm.


Joyce should have got a cat...

For all these reasons, while I still enjoyed the read (and will be reading the fourth instalment), I think this is the weakest of the ones I've read so far.

Others, though, emphatically disagree...

Other pluses: A couple of the protagonists are trying their hand at detective fiction, and I like the send-ups there.

And the ending is moving. Joyce and Elizabeth visit Viktor, and Joyce insists on swimming in his spectacular pool, even though it's cold and wintry. Elizabeth tells her the pool will still be there in the summer: "'Ah, but we may not be,' Joyce had replied, and she was right. It was best to grab everything while you could. Who knows when your final swim might come, your final walk, your final kiss?"

So Elizabeth watches Joyce, who is keeping her head out of the water as she swims, so that her hair stays dry: "Joyce sees Elizabeth looking, and gives her a wave. Elizabeth waves back. You keep swimming, Joyce. You keep swimming, my beautiful friend. You keep your head above the water for as long as you can."

We can't wish anything better for each other.