The Thursday Murder Club Series 5-Book Box Set by Richard Osman Review: A Cozy Crime Phenomenon Worth Collecting

At the heart of every book is the Thursday Murder Club itself: four elderly residents of Cooper's Chase, a retirement village near the fictitious seaside village of Fairhaven in Kent. The quartet comprises Elizabeth Best, a former spy; Ron Ritchie, an ex-union leader; Joyce Meadowcroft, a retired nurse; and Ibrahim Arif, a psychiatrist. The club was formed to discuss unsolved cold cases, but across all five novels the four find themselves entangled in live investigations and very real murders. Supporting the ensemble are Detective Chief Inspector Chris Hudson and Police Constable Donna De Freitas, Elizabeth's husband Stephen (who lives with dementia), and the handyman Bogdan Jankowski — a character Osman has confirmed was inspired by Lee Child's Jack Reacher. The second book, The Man Who Died Twice, escalates the stakes when Elizabeth receives a plea for help from an old colleague whose story involves stolen diamonds and a violent mobster. Each subsequent instalment builds on the established world while delivering a self-contained mystery.

The opening novel alone rewrote British publishing history. It sold 45,000 copies in its first three days on sale and became a Sunday Times number-one bestseller. In the week leading up to 19 December 2020, it sold 134,514 copies, making it — as Wikipedia's series entry records — the first debut novel ever to reach the Christmas number one position in the UK. Critics described it as the "fastest selling adult crime debut" in recorded history, and Christina Hardyment, writing in The Times, called its plot "ingenious." The series has not slowed: The Last Devil to Die reached number one on the New York Times Best Seller list on 8 October 2023, and The Impossible Fortune debuted at number one on the Sunday Times Bestseller list on 4 October 2025. A Netflix film adaptation, produced by Steven Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment and directed by Chris Columbus, was released on 27 August 2025, with Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley, and Celia Imrie leading the cast.

Osman's series draws obvious and acknowledged comparison to Agatha Christie — the premise and title bear clear similarities to Christie's The Tuesday Club Murders, which also features a protagonist named Joyce. What distinguishes Osman's approach is the deliberate inversion of the genre's typical hero: here, the detectives are pensioners whose age is a source of both comedy and genuine poignancy, rather than a limitation to be overcome. The first novel's 115 short chapters across roughly 400 pages — a structure replicated across the series — keeps the pacing brisk and the books accessible for a wide range of readers. The ensemble format also allows Osman to rotate perspectives and voices, with Joyce Meadowcroft's diary entries a particularly noted structural device in the opening instalment.

Collecting all five novels in a single paperback edition makes this box set the most efficient way to enter — or complete — the series. The set spans the full arc of the Thursday Murder Club's investigations from their debut cold-case discussions through to The Impossible Fortune in 2025, providing continuity of character development that rewards reading in sequence. It is worth noting that the original novels were published by Viking Press, a Penguin Random House imprint; this particular box set is published by Mind Quest Inc. Readers who prioritise a specific edition's production values should take that into account before purchasing, as this review cannot assess the physical object firsthand.

The series is squarely designed for readers who enjoy character-led cozy crime fiction with a British sensibility, dry humour, and an ensemble of older protagonists. Its crossover appeal has been demonstrated by its performance on both UK and US bestseller lists. Readers seeking hard-boiled procedural fiction or graphic crime writing will find the series operates in a different register entirely. The one structural limitation inherent to any box set of this kind is format inflexibility: at a combined print length of 2,162 pages in paperback, the set is a substantial physical commitment, and readers who prefer e-book or audiobook formats — the audiobook of the first novel, read by Lesley Manville, won the Sounds of Crime Award at Crimefest in 2021 — will find those editions better suited to their habits. The box set format, by its nature, also means individual volumes cannot easily be lent out without dismantling the collection.