Genre: Cosy Detective

Narrative Style: First person from one point of view, third person from a lot of different perspectives

Rating: 2/5

Published: 2020

Format: Paperback

Synopsis: Four septuagenarians meet every week to try and solve old police cases. Then a murder occurs that is linked to their care home. They can’t help but get involved.

Time on shelf: Not long. This was given to me by my father in law because he hadn’t really liked it and he wondered what I would think of it.

I’m always a bit sceptical of celebrities writing novels. Sales are based on the famous name rather than the quality of the prose so there is no need for it to be amazing. However, I did think that if anyone could do it well, Osman could. After all, he is clearly intelligent and witty so I had higher hopes for this then I would have had for any other celebrity effort.

This intelligence is clear throughout. The main reason that this book has two stars rather than one is that it is not badly written. Osman can string a sentence together and he has a good vocabulary. It is tightly plotted with plenty (perhaps too many) twists and turns. I can see why people might enjoy it. However, I found it irritating from almost the very first.

There are a number of problems. The first one to come to light, is the switching between characters. Osman has opted for one first person narrator and any number of third person perspectives. This isn’t a problem in itself but Osman’s chapters tend to be short and they jump around all over the place so you barely get to grips with one perspective before you have to deal with the next. It starts to feel a bit chaotic.

The next thing is the tone. This book is clever and it knows. There are lots of little jokes and asides. The prose really rubbed me up the wrong way. For example, ‘How peculiar to be in this room! He shivers. Probably just the cold.’ For a start, it is present tense which is annoying. Then it is supposed to suggest something about Father Mackie (the shiverer in question) and make the reader suspicious but it is so heavy handed and unsubtle that I couldn’t take it seriously.

The characters are a wacky crew. Elizabeth, the leader of the group, was formally a spy and her former exploits are dropped casually into the narrative. She has any number of useful contacts and is adept at being two steps ahead of everyone else. However, instead of seeming like a fully rounded character, she starts to seem slightly superhuman in her leaps of intuition. There really isn’t all that much more to her either. She’s a former spy and Osman never lets us forget it. Similarly, Ron Ritchie is a union man, through and through and, again, little more. Joyce and Ibrahim are even less interesting. Joyce is a bit drippy and Ibrahim was presumably included for diversity reasons rather than anything else.

Finally, there is not a single moment of this novel when I wasn’t aware I was reading a book. The events are unconvincing. The characters – particularly the police – are unconvincing. Then there are the number of twists and turns. A better name for this book might be A Plethora of Red Herrings. There are only so many times I can stand being lead up the garden path. This novel has you running up and down it constantly. Not satisfying. I will not be reading on. Not that it matters. No doubt, millions will.