The Last Devil To Die, Richard Osman Book Review

I have thoroughly enjoyed Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series, and the Last Devil to Die is the fourth in the series. I listened as always on Audible.

The Blurb

Shocking news reaches the Thursday Murder Club.

An old friend in the antiques business has been killed, and a dangerous package he was protecting has gone missing.

As the gang springs into action they encounter art forgers, online fraudsters and drug dealers, as well as heartache close to home.

With the body count rising, the package still missing and trouble firmly on their tail, has their luck finally run out? And who will be the last devil to die?

My Review of the Last Devil to Die

I was so excited to read/listen to this book as I’ve loved Richard Osman’s previous books in the Thursday Murder Club Series. They do run in order though, so it’s probably better to start at the beginning. They are nice easy reads though.

The Thursday Murder Club are a group of Octogenarians living in a retirement village who get together every Thursday to discuss cold cases. They soon started solving actual murders though and it’s just amazing what a group of old people can do together. They are quite special older people though, and I won’t give spoilers but they each have special talents and have led interesting lives. It’s great to see that life doesn’t have to be boring after 80!

In this book we touch on some of the more delicate parts of getting older and it’s really quite touching in parts. Again, no spoilers, but I may have shed a tear. It’s not all sad though, I love the way Richard Osman can inject so much humour into stories about murder, drug dealing and even cyber crime.

We have the usual group in the story, you have to read through the books to really get to know the characters. Joyce helps to condense the story by writing diary extracts. These are great to help get the complicated plot lines into focus and to learn a little more about Joyce’s feelings and views.

We also have some new characters, new drug dealers, antique dealers and even police officers.

The basic plot is that a friend of the club is murdered and it seems to be linked to a heroin deal gone wrong. He is given a pot of heroin which he just has to pass on the next day but he doesn’t and the pot goes missing and he is killed. So, they have to find out who killed him, why he didn’t just hand over the heroin, who is after the heroin, why the usual police officers are taken off the case and why are so may people being killed for what is ‘relatively’ a minor amount of heroin? And if that’s not all enough to deal with, they are also trying to catch the con-artist that is stealing money from a new resident by pretending to be a new online love interest.

I loved seeing Joyce take on Elizabeth’s characteristics because she had other things to deal with and was really not her usual self. I love Joyce, she is definitely my favourite character. I also love Ibrahim and it was nice to hear more about his past, however sad it was.

Overall I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would probably have got through it a lot quicker had family life not got in the way. I didn’t want to stop listening.

The narrator was Fiona Shaw who also narrated the last book. She’s really good at capturing all of the characters and I really enjoyed listening. I am so tempted to get the paperback editions of these books too. I do know that reading is a totally different experience.

You can buy The Last Devil to Die in hardback or paperback on Amazon or other good book stores.

Here are the links to my previous reviews of The Thursday Murder Club series.

The Thursday Murder Club

The Man Who Died Twice

The Bullet That Missed