Review: We Solve Murders - Richard Osman

Contains spoilers for We Solve Murders and The Thursday Murder Club.

It's become something of a stereotype that to sell murder mysteries these days you need to have some sort of lowered stakes. Hence the subgenre of 'cozy crime' doing numbers on tiktok and instagram, the evident new hub of literary marketing. I fell for it, as most new readers do, with Osman's Thursday Murder Club series, the first of which I read on holiday and bought the second one as soon as it came out. The final two books in the series failed to make the same impression on me but I read them with ease. I liked Osman's wittiness, the characters I had come to respect, and the general comedic absurdity of the eponymous club.

I had high hopes for the new book, We Solve murders. From the title and blurb alone I could tell it would follow Osman's witty style and situational comedy, but I went into it wondering if Osman could manage, after 4 very successful books, to peel back the 'cozy' aspects and give us something new, something a bit more serious, with raised stakes and action.

There is no shortage of guns being pulled, windows smashing, large sums laundered across the world, indeed. His characteristic comedy is intact, if a little over-indulgent, but I had no qualms with it. I enjoyed reading them as much as I did the previous series. They worked just as well, clear that Osman was very confident in the niche he had a hand in creating.

The problem is, and I don't say this lightly, that it's still a Thursday Murder Club book, no matter how much it's disguised. Although the stakes are raised to international crime, billionaires with no remorse and hired guns with even less, i found it very difficult to humanise the characters beyond their role in the story.

I forced myself to hear the book out to the end, but I can't pretend I wasn't turned off from as early as chapter 4. To make matters worse, I found several typos and questionable editing choices that made reading this book feel like reading a first draft. It only cemented the idea that the book was only written as a hasty attempt to write something other than cozy crime, without taking the time to deconstruct those writing habits.

The prose came across as dry between jokes, and I became frustrated at points when side characters witnessed something dramatic like a gunfight, and reacted with nothing more than a witty comment. The most compelling character was admittedly Rosie D'Antonio, although half of her dialogue, again, was comedic. It was only near the end when her paranoia at being hunted down appeared, and when faced with her presumed murderer, she merely joked again, all sincerity wiped away, as Rosie retreated into the two-dimensional shell she'd been since her first appearance in chapter 2.

The first few chapters are always, always intended to hook the reader. This is a rule very few authors waver from, and none that I can name off the top of my head. It simply makes no sense to leave the interesting bits beyond the rapidly narrowing threshold of the reader's attention span. Osman recognises this, but tries too hard. Within the first few chapters, countless characters are introduced, with very little characterisation or action to show for. This type of misdirection feels rather cheap, as it's too easy for the crime writer to pull a forgotten character from an early chapter and magically make them into the twist villain. Osman, here, is guilty. At least in the first Thursday Murder Club, Bogdan was a constant presence in the story, so the distraction actually worked. Here, it didn't.

I have various gripes with the book's villain, Loubet. Initially, I disagreed with his motivation. Money laundering is far from the most exciting crime to write about, but Osman made it work within the context he wrote in. Using influencers to bring large sums across borders with fake media companies backing them was an interesting idea, and navigated with proper attention. The minor character, Bonnie, was one of the more sympathetic narrators, as the stakes in her story (though small) felt more real and genuine than the rest of the characters did. I found myself rooting for her more than the leads, though her presence was minimal and didn't impact the plot much, if at all.

But Loubet's motivation... didn't compel me at all. 'Insurance' isn't exactly an interesting enough reason to kill someone who has nothing to do with you. From the world's most notorious money launderer (Osman spares no expense in reminding us that, several times over) I expected more. More, in terms of character, background, presence in the novel at least. His identity is hidden even as he narrates his own chapters. 'Narrates' may be too generous, as his voice is masked by ChatGPT's 'polite English gentleman' style. As an avid AI hater, especially when it comes to writing, I was unable to look past the very presence of the AI in the novel, even if it wasn't actually used in writing. Let's consider it now, though.

Loubet's motivation for using AI to hide his writing style may be a good choice, in reality. But if we look past the realism of why a money launderer would want to hide his identity in his writing style, you have to sacrifice a key element of crime fiction: your criminals need to be interesting. I wasn't interested at all in Loubet, or finding him, simply because I didn't know anything about him beyond his crime. He may have been charming, or irritating, or dazzlingly mysterious, any of which would have been enough reason to read on and actually want to find out who he was. In the end, I discovered his secret identity with nothing more than relief, that I could finally speed through to the end and cross this book off of my reading list.

Just like your protagonists, your villains need to be interesting, and they can't do that if they don't even use their own words.

Reading back my first few paragraphs, I briefly considered that I'm no longer the target audience for this book. I still enjoyed Osman's writing. Near the end, I actually anticipated the unravelling of the various intertwined mysteries. I wanted justice for Bonnie, who was fooled into believing she could make it big as an interior design influencer. I shared in Steve's longing to return to the little village he'd retired to. I wanted Amy and Adam to reconnect and finally have the relationship they had been putting off because of their work, and for Adam to rekindle his relationship with his father and find a middle ground in their very different lifestyles.

In the end, the only relationship that was rekindled was that of the rival best friends and ex-business partners Jeff and Henk. Justice was hardly served, because there was no fight for justice. The dead characters were dead before the book's events began, and readers placated with a passing comment about a percentage of earnings from the now-legitimate media company going to their families. One character, a professed hitman, got off scott-free as he was revealed to be a fan of Rosie's, and was even hinted at becoming a crime fiction writer with Rosie's guidance.

There was a distinct lack of closure as Amy roped Steve in to creating a new detective agency, 'We Solve Murders,' at which point I groaned out loud and closed the book forever.

I managed to finish this book in short bursts. Few and far between. I think it's clear by now how disappointed I was throughout, and especially at the end, at how the book fails to deviate from Osman's usual writing, and adheres to almost every pitfall of modern crime fiction. My expectations were high, and still are high for Osman's later books, but it will take a lot more effort to shake off the lingering presence of the previous series if he wants his next works to succeed on their own.

Unfortunately, the rating remains a firm 1/5 for We Solve Murders, but I remain optimistic for what follows.