The Bullet That Missed
The Bullet that Missed
As you know, I don’t like to judge an author on one book – especially perhaps one that has catapulted into the bestselling lists. So, I bought two of Richard Osman‘s novels and have just finished reading the second one.
The Bullet that Missed (clever title, by the way) features The Thursday Murder Club (TTMC) again. Once a week this gang of four pensioners in a retirement village, meet to look over old police files and try to solve murders, although their remit is decidedly elastic. This time they’re together investigating the unsolved Bethany Waites case: a brilliant young reporter who vanished while investigating a massive VAT fraud relating to the import and export of mobile phones. What is already known?
She was murdered almost ten years ago
She had got too close to the secrets of the fraudsters.
Her car plunged off of Shakespeare’s Cliff near Dover, late at night.
Someone had been in the car with her just beforehand.
There were ambiguous messages on her phone.
She left a note for a fellow reporter: I don’t say this often enough, but thank you.
Well … the police may deem it murder, but Elizabeth Best of THMC knows you should never trust a murder without a corpse. And she should know: she has faked a few deaths of her own over the years as an MI5 agent. And Bethany’s body has never been found.
Fast forward ten years and Elizabeth is suddenly being bombarded with threatening texts in her present real life. She’s wary, but then, uncharacteristically, makes a big mistake: she goes for a walk with her husband at the same time along the same route every day, giving her enemy an open invitation to strike her down and abduct her. And that someone wants her to go on a deadly mission: to kill a man she knew years ago, or her best friend Joyce Meadowcroft’s life will be forfeit. Elizabeth’s husband Stephen, abducted with her, is suffering from dementia, and at the stage of being aware something isn’t right but not sure what it is. He has flashes of perceptiveness however, and now, rare and expensive books in the library where his abductor took them, jog his memory and help him to identify Elizabeth’s tormentor. She links up with an old ally, a former KGB colonel, Viktor, the very man she was instructed to kill, and they combine skills to attempt to outwit their common foe, a money-laundering Swede nicknamed The Viking. He is closing in but hasn’t bargained on their disarming friendliness or cunning.
Joyce Meadowcroft meanwhile, unaware that her life is in Elizabeth’s hands, is beavering away at the cold case and involves her lawyer daughter to dig deeper into the facts relating to the murder of Bethany Waites. A gathering collection of anomalies move thinking on. Then one of the the key players in the case is murdered in prison. A fellow inmate, a notorious drug baron, manipulates the elderly sleuths and plots to kill one of them (Ron) and his associate once she is released. The past and present become inextricably tangled.
The introduction of new characters such as the KGB colonel is definitely a brilliant move in the machinations of TTMC. Convoluted layers of intrigue unravel, revealing different facets of the truth or lies according to the differing perspectives. Master-crooks get involved, enemies become allies, confessions become red herrings, bodies keep turning up, big money creates temptations, cryptocurrency offers new opportunities, careers are made and broken in an instant. Osman is setting things up to weave ever more complex stories. And therein lies the test for a writer – keeping all the threads perfectly woven and unbroken, maintaining the tension without unduly repeating the detail or pattern. Methinks this mighty mind will be well up to the challenge.
Overall assessment after two books? Much more depth and complexity than I first thought. Rather like the deceptively simple four main elderly characters in TTMC. Still not books I would just have to hang on to, and I’m not racing to get the others in the series, but I’m looking for a good outlet for these two – someone looking for light-hearted easy-read diversion from life’s stresses.