In the splendid retirement village of Cooper’s Chase which lies not too far from Kent UK, live four friends, all in their seventies, who solve cold case files. There’s Joyce, a former nurse, Ron, a trades unionist, Ibrahim, a retired college professor, and Elizabeth, a spy in her prior life,   MI5 or 16, It’s Elizabeth who gets in with the local police department to acquire cold cases.  This is the third book and I understand the fourth one is due out in September.   

The Bullet that Missed
by Richard Osman
2022 / 
Read by Fiona Brennen 11h 16m
Rating – B+ / mystery 
(Thursday Murder Club #3) 

This time it seems as though a decades-old case comes to life “in current time” and Elizabeth, the ex-spy, finds herself running into old “friends,” one from the KGB and the other a Viking – lol!, but it works.

What happened one night 10 years ago, is that Bethany Waites, a TV reporter, was killed in a car wreck when she “accidentally?” went over a cliff. She’d been investigating massive tax fraud and money laundering in high places.  BUT! Her body wasn’t found.  So the septuagenarian sleuths are on the case looking for various kinds of information.  

Yes, this is a thriller in its own way. but it seemed rather slow-moving at first, the narrator’s voice is a bit soft for my tastes and there are a lot of characters. But I kept going in spite of that and after I figured out what was going on my interest swung right up there. Good stuff. 

Although they get a bit silly sometimes, these are fun books, I occasionally laughed out loud. They’re twisty and intriguing at the same time. Different chapters are told by different characters and just when you think it can’t go any further, the floor drops out.  

https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2022/09/16/richard-osman-bullet-that-missed-review/