Reading and Other Adventures This Week

Richard Osman, The Impossible Fortune.
I was really looking forward to this new book about the Thursday Murder Club.
Sadly, I did not find it nearly as enjoyable as the earlier ones in the series.

Another episode of the Great British Baking Show — here are some of the participants.

Early October Treats

 

We have never before bought Halloween candy so early! It’s very good and might not last until
the Trick-or-Treaters get here. We will probably have to buy more. I do like Snickers bars.

Spaghetti casserole with lots of cheesy crumb topping.

On the Street

Walking through downtown… bicycle chaos and…

A mural for Sami’s Monday Murals.

Warm sunny weather is lasting into October. No frost so far.

New Plants in my Window

Blog post © 2025 mae sander

New Detectives from Richard Osman

 

Photo of the private pool in a luxury room at Jade Mountain, Saint Lucia, 2010.

In Richard Osman’s latest book, We Solve Murders, the main characters at one point check into a resort on the island of Saint Lucia in the Caribbean. I recognized this location immediately when their driver took them over a hair-raising rough road that the resort refuses to pave because they want to keep out the rabble. Here’s the description of an impressive suite — like one that we toured. We stayed down the hill in the less expensive part of the resort. Osman’s description:

“There is a swimming pool actually inside his room, brilliant sapphire blue, marbled with dancing veins of sunlight in gold and silver. Tiny birds are cheeping and chirruping on the wide, high terrace, and three bottles of beer sit sweating with frost in an ice bucket. In the far distance twin volcanoes jut out into the sea, two perfect triangles dipping their toes into the Caribbean.” (p. 182)

Having read all four of the Thursday Murder Club mysteries, I was eager to see what author Richard Osman would write next. Again, the book is suspenseful in the extreme, with very likable detectives: one is a professional body guard who’s accustomed to extreme violence; another is a best-selling author; and the third detective is a retired policeman who is reluctantly drawn into the action. They start out trying to solve a series of three or maybe four murders, but the plot becomes more and more elaborate.

The action is located all over the place. An English village with a weekly pub trivia contest and a typical menu from which Steve, the retired policeman, orders for himself and friends: “Two shepherd’s pies, a beer-battered fish and chips, and a lamb shank. Same as always.”

Other places where the action takes place: a private estate on an island in South Carolina. The resort in Saint Lucia. A prison in Dubai. And so on. Everyone is constantly crossing oceans and continents on private jets, with a wide selection of beer and onboard gourmet meals presented by well-trained servants — but the retired policeman prefers crisps or a scotch egg to gourmet food. Here’s the conversation on the plane between former-policeman Steve and Brad, the steward on one of the private jets:

When Steve returns to his seat—a sofa, of all things—Brad offers him sushi on a silver tray. Steve takes a look. “Do you have anything else?” he asks. “A sausage roll? Some crisps?” 

“I think we have some Parmesan croutons?” says Brad. “I’ll ask the chef.” 

“Or a Scotch egg?” says Steve. “Whatever you’ve got. I was supposed to be having bolognese tonight, so if there’s any bolognese?” 

“Of course,” says Brad. “And can I get you a drink? We have eighteen types of vodka.” 

“Do you have beer?” asks Steve. 

“We have twelve types of beer,” says Brad. 

“Do you have an ale? Something with a bit of oomph?” 

“I couldn’t say,” says Brad. “Why don’t I bring out all twelve, and we’ll have a tasting?”

When the detectives-in-spite of themselves aren’t flying on some rich person’s jet, there’s a lot of excitement. Gunshots are fired over and over. A few dead bodies result. No time for sympathy. Sometimes there’s too much going on and it’s hard to keep all the characters and crimes straight. But it’s fun!

Besides the many characters who are unwittingly drawn into the search for the murderers, we learn about the perpetrators of an immensely complex and multi-layer set of mainly financial crimes. All very intriguing! The final reveal is a bit of a surprise, including disclosure of lots of multiple identities and aliases.

Read it!

Review © 2024 mae sander. Photos © 2010.

Books, Bakes, and Netflix

The sky has been beautiful this week!

Reading

"Foster," a novella by Irish writer Claire Keegan is narrated by a child trying to understand what's happening when her father drops her off in an unfamiliar family for several weeks. Poor kid never quite gets what is going on. You, the reader, can almost guess. At the start:

"She leads me into the house. There’s a moment of darkness in the hallway; when I hesitate, she hesitates with me. We walk through into the heat of the kitchen where I am told to sit down, to make myself at home. Under the smell of baking there’s some disinfectant, some bleach. She lifts a rhubarb tart out of the oven and puts it on the bench to cool: syrup on the point of bubbling over, thin leaves of pastry baked into the crust. A cool draught from the door blows in, but here it is hot and still and clean. Tall ox-eyed daisies are still as the tall glass of water they are standing in." (Foster p. 8).

Mystery Reading List

Beginning to run out of ideas on what to read, I was happy to see a Washington Post article titled: "The 10 best mystery novels of 2023: Richard Osman, Brendan Slocumb and Elly Griffiths are among the authors who kept us happily guessing whodunnit this year." I've read and liked three of the ten selections. I'm not crazy about The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp but I might try one or two more from this list to see if there are some good new ideas.

One of the Washington Post's 10 best mysteries of the year so far.

Leonie Swann is a pseudonymn for some German writer whose real identity seems unknown. The internet seems to have virtually no information about this author. I can't find any real reviews of The Sunset Years of Agnes Sharp. I wonder how it ended up on the Washington Post list. 

I find this novel mildly offensive because of its very ugly ideas about elderly people and how brain-dead they are, and how they try to overcome their miserable mental and physical decline. The characters int he book rarely walk: they hobble or dodder or stumble. Their minds are foggy. Maybe some readers find this funny, or at least think elderly people are a fair target for insensitive humor. I don't find it so. 

It's true that each chapter has the name of a very typical British food, and that this food plays a role in the chapter. Chelsea Buns, Cottage Pie, Curry, Victoria Sponge, Scones, Bangers and Mash, Biscuits, Gin and Tonic and on and on. But this isn't the Great British Baking Show. This foodie stuff isn't enough to make me like the book. In fact, it's sort of mechanical and annoying.

The murder-mystery plot is not terrible, but not great either, and the ending is contrived. Maybe it's supposed to be some kind of farce or satire. Not very successful...I don't recommend it.

Two Books on Bread

The Bakers of Paris and the Bread Question 1700-1775 (published 1996) and Good Bread is Back (published 2005) by Steven Laurence Kaplan: two very scholarly and excruciatingly detailed books about bread. Topics include the history of bread in France, its social implications, economic consequences, controversies over acceptable ingredients and techniques, technical baking details, and more. These books focus on the 18th and 20th century. I found them tough reading, and didn't really read every bit carefully. But if you want to know about French bread, I think Kaplan is really the world expert and there will never be another.

Actual Bread in Our Kitchen

Reading about French bread inspired a bake from the famous Poilâne book...

Len's beautiful and delicious Poilâne loaf.

New Netflix Series

In eight episodes, this animated series follows a wandering samurai (or ronin) in ancient Japan has all kinds of adventures on a quest to find their father. The art work is fabulous, with echoes or even direct copying of Japanese woodblocks and other art works. The adventures are a bit predictable, but the beauty of the scenes and the use of Japanese themes kept me watching. In fact, I will probably watch Season 2 if it doesn't descend into too much repetition. Definitely adult content! Not for prudes or the faint of heart!

Reviews © 2023 mae sander

“The Last Devil to Die”

The Thursday Murder Club is at it again, with a new novel, which begins at Christmas just last year. You know it was last year because two of the characters watched the king’s Christmas speech. That would be King Charles, whose first Christmas as king it was. They thought he did a good job.

The Last Devil to Die is full of amusing tidbits, just like the previous three volumes in the series. Numerous cups of tea are drunk, numerous cakes baked and eaten, especially by Murder Club member Joyce — though there’s also a Battenberg baked by one of the suspects.

A Battenberg from the Great British Baking Show.
Joyce’s bakes remind me of this quintessentially British food show!

“I am going to make a pavlova later. But with mangoes,” Joyce writes. (p. 349) 

“You can’t rely on the food,” says Joyce, unpacking a Tupperware box of chocolate hazelnut brownies.” … “Is it true that Pauline puts marijuana in her brownies?” asks Joyce. “She does,” says Ron. “Marijuana and coconut.” (p. 324) 

“It will be Joyce, and she will have cake, Bob,” says Ibrahim. “I am sure of it.” (p. 219) 

“I’ll be round with a lemon meringue and a notepad,” writes Joyce about a new neighbor. (p. 53)

While hunting for the murderer of one of their friends, these pensioners are always having meetings that involve light refreshments. Their choices are sometimes trendy; for example, when an intruder looks in Joyce’s refrigerator he sees  “Almond milk. Joyce moves with the times.” Although usually not very domestic, Elizabeth on one occasion makes tea at Joyce’s apartment; she uses the almond milk, but is dubious about its appropriateness. Joyce’s daughter, when asked about using almond milk, calls her mother “officially a hipster.” (p. 161 & 348)

Author Richard Osman drinks a mug of tea (source)

Richard Osman’s version of the cozy mystery genre appeals to me because it's done with such a light, humorous touch. Along with the tea and cake, Osman does serve some grizzly violence and lots of danger, which offsets the cuteness. The four original members of the Murder Club — Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron, and Ibrahim — search for the vicious killer of their friend as more bodies pile up somewhat mercilessly, but they don't lose their analytic skills or their taste for a mug of tea. They follow the evidence and search for a mysteriously missing cache of heroin, several desperate drug dealers, and some unscrupulous antique sellers and art forgers. Plenty of action.

The satiric nature of this novel is offset with passages of heavy pathos, deep grief, and genuine tragedy. As in each of the previous books, several chapters consist of Joyce’s diary, which is very insightful and often leads to solutions to the crime puzzles the group is working on. But also in her thoughts we learn of Joyce’s deep mourning for her late husband, who had died several years earlier. 

In each of the Thursday Murder series, Elizabeth’s beloved husband Stephen is sinking deeper and deeper into dementia. In The Last Devil to Die, his condition, which has become unbearable, is described in great detail -- very painful reading! This book sees a kind of conclusion and a very great amount of suffering for everyone, especially the brilliant and usually resourceful Elizabeth. Some readers might find the detailed descriptions of a man losing his sense of identity and his memory of himself and of his friends and even of his wife to be a bit mawkish, but I thought it was done with skill and a fair amount of tact.

If you liked the earlier books, I think you’ll like this one. The mainstream publications I read haven't yet reviewed this just-published book, so I can't compare my reaction to that of the professionals!

Review © 2023 mae sander. Photos as credited.

Shared with Elizabeth’s blog.

The Thursday Murder Club Again

“Morning has broken at Coopers Chase. From the window of Elizabeth’s flat you can see the dog-walkers, and a few latecomers rushing to Over-Eighties Zumba. The air hums with friendly greetings, and the sounds of birdsong and Amazon delivery vans.” (p. 27)

The Bullet that Missed: Another great story from Richard Osman’s highly entertaining group of friends that meet on Thursdays in the jigsaw room of Coopers Chase, their retirement community! By the end of the novel, these exceptional characters have once again solved a cold case and brought several miscreants to justice, while providing us, the readers, with lots of fun. 

At the center of their investigation are a famous but aging TV news presenter and a make-up artist who helps him stay good looking. Some of the club members are a bit star struck, so they chose to re-open the unsolved murder of a colleague of this minor celebrity in order to get to meet him. This seems especially amusing when one knows that TV presenting of this sort was the author’s earlier claim to fame. If the reader is supposed to recognize real people in this story, though, I am deficient, as I know nothing about British TV stuff.

Osman’s characters are as good as ever. Elizabeth, the former high-level spy never disappoints! Joyce, the most naive member of the group, as always records in her diary the progress of their investigation as she sees it, and at the same time, reflects her domestic concerns. For example, she writes:

“Sitting on my sofa, watching a program about trains, is a man called Viktor Illyich. He’s a former KGB agent. He’s Ukrainian. I told him I wanted to write my diary and he laughed and said I had plenty to write about today. I have left him with a glass of sherry and a slice of cherry-and-dark-chocolate cake. I saw it on Instagram and thought it had Ron’s name all over it. But, as it turns out, Viktor is getting the first slice, which goes to show how plans can change. The rest is in Tupperware for Ron though. … Viktor says the cake is very good. I know he would say that anyway, but he’s had the whole slice, so let’s assume he’s telling the truth. I don’t normally like dark chocolate, as a rule, but it really works here. It has Kirsch in it too, so that helps.” (p. 149)

As in the earlier books in the series, two low-level police officers are also involved, though never anywhere as effective at solving crimes as the retirees. They are investigating a mysterious crash of a van, which I think is left as a loose end when the main mystery is resolved — would someone tell me if they’ve read the book and I am wrong about this? Some of the criminal characters from an earlier book are also involved in this one. Chris, one of the two partners in the police team, is still trying to eat healthy food. 

He has “lost a stone and a half in weight. He recently bought himself a T-shirt in size L, instead of his usual XL, or occasional, shameful XXL. He eats salmon and broccoli now. He eats so much broccoli he can spell it without looking it up. When was the last time he had a Toblerone? He can’t even remember.” (p 31)

Suspense builds very effectively in The Bullet that Missed. You can tell from the title that there are guns in the story, and that’s really important for a story set in England where there aren’t guns in almost every household the way there are here. (OK, it’s only 40%, but still…) The characters are brave, resourceful, and very clever — but I’m not going to tell you more and spoil the mystery. How wonderful that these stories keeps being fun to read — as always I’m grateful to my sister who gave me the first novel in the series.

Review © 2022 mae sander

 

More of the Thursday Murder Club

The Man Who Died Twice by Richard Osman.
Published 2021,

The Thursday Murder Club is an informal organization of several friends who live in a retirement community in an idyllic area of England. I met them in Richard Osman's first novel, The Thursday Murder Club, which I reviewed last year. The new novel, The Man Who Died Twice, is also very amusing, suspenseful, full of great surprises, and characterized by a rather remarkable body count, mainly -- but not solely -- bad guys. 

The sequel centers around two cases: one being investigated by two police detectives named Chris and Donna, and the other involving "spies" -- that is, members of MI5 and MI6, the British secret services that we all know from watching James Bond and other relevant movies. Both cases proceed with help from the members of the Club.

I'll skip directly to the perceptive way that the author uses food to define his characters. For example,  one of the spies was described as "a small woman with a nose ring and an Ottolenghi cookbook." (p. 95). 

Joyce, one of the retirees, is important in both novels. Passages from her diary, interspersed with the novel's third-person narrative, give a lot of clues about the action. Sometimes she doesn't quite know what is going on, but sometimes her observations are critical to the plot. Joyce provides constant cups of tea to herself and others. One time, as she is getting ready to entertain a woman whom she hasn't met before, she writes: "I have no idea what she likes, and I couldn’t find a place in our conversation to ask her. So I’m playing it very safe with a Victoria sponge, some brownies with no nuts, and a coconut and raspberry slice in case she’s adventurous." (p. 102).

A Victoria Sponge by Paul Hollywood of the Great British Baking Show.
This is one of many TV programs mentioned in the novel (source).

Chocolate comes up a lot. Joyce buys chocolate to bring to her friend Ibrahim but something always goes wrong. Joyce was bringing him a candy bar, but she fails: "I can’t tell you how tempted I am to have some of this Dairy Milk. I know Ibrahim will let me have some as soon as I hand it over, but you know what it’s like when’s it’s just staring you straight in the face? I should have bought him grapes, then I wouldn’t have been tempted. I will have a bit of the chocolate now. Don’t you think? I’ll just nip up to the shop and buy him a new one before the taxi arrives. Then everyone’s happy, aren’t they?" (p. 50). 

And there's Joyce's trip on the Eurostar to Belgium: "We had to head back to the station but, on the way, I bought some chocolate for Ibrahim and some beer for Ron. The shop even wrapped them nicely. ... It was quite a long journey back, so somewhere in northern France I unwrapped Ibrahim’s chocolates and we ate them, and then I unwrapped Ron’s beers and we drank them." (p. 274). 

The policeman Chris works with his colleague Donna, whose health-conscious mother he has just started seeing romantically: "Stakeouts with Chris Hudson used to be more fun. There would be crisps, there would be quizzes, there would be gossip about the new DS who’d just started at Fairhaven and had accidentally sent a picture of his penis to a local shopkeeper who was asking for advice on security grilles. They’d laugh, they’d eat, they’d put the world to rights. But now? Sitting in Chris’s Ford Focus on a late-autumn evening, keeping a watchful eye on Connie Johnson’s lockup? Now Chris has a Tupperware container filled with olives, carrot batons, and hummus. The Tupperware container bought by her mum, the hummus made by her mum, and the carrot batons sliced by her mum." (pp. 12-13).

This continues as Chris sees more of Donna's mother: "He is pretending to eat healthily, which, after a couple of days, he realizes is the same as actually eating healthily. An apple is an apple whether you are eating it because you like to take care of yourself or you are eating it to impress a new girlfriend. The nutrients are the same. Chris hasn’t had a Snickers since Monday." (p. 127).

And much later: "Chris Hudson munches on a carrot baton. When you got used to them they actually weren’t so bad. Well, they were, but it seemed to matter less. ... A man voluntarily eating carrot batons. That really was someone to be." (p. 323-324)). 

The two Murder Club novels are very fun to read! I suspect that there will be more of them in the future.

Review © 2022 mae sander.

It's Still Chanukah!

The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman, a recently published mystery tale, was a Chanukah gift from my sister. I started reading it Friday (the second night of Chanukah), and finished it on Sunday, enjoying every minute. It's a well-plotted mystery full of surprise twists with a number of very amusing characters. Quite a few of them live in a retirement village in England where they have a club that meets on Thursday in the jigsaw room, scheduled between Art History and Conversational French. The narrative includes a lot of very amusing wisecracks and observations about popular culture, which I like about this first-time author (who appears to be well-known as a British TV personality, but not to me).

The purpose of the Thursday Murder Club is for the members to spend their two-hour time slot revisiting murder cases from police files illegitimately kept by a former police officer who lives in the Village. It's an armchair pastime for intelligent people with a bit too little to keep them occupied. Baking lemon drizzle cake or going out for coffee or shopping is one thing; figuring out murders is something else. Of course a real murder stirs them into real -- and effective -- action, despite their advancing age. Other characters in the novel are couple of police officers (yes, they eat donuts), a few random criminals (some in hiding), and a very unpleasant real estate developer. Quite a good read: I am grateful to my sister for discovering it for me.

Chanukah dinner the third night of the holiday:

note Len's great rye bread just behind the candles.

Soup in my newest soup cup.

The fourth night: a platter of latkes for two.

It's sad to make them for just us, as we often have as many as 10 at table

for the holiday. That said, it's a lot easier to make a smaller number of latkes.

Latkes with applesauce, sliced pear, creamy yogurt, and a glass of wine.

 which I'm sharing with Elizabeth's virtual Tuesday drinking party.

The last candle to go out in the bird menorah that I

bought in Jerusalem in 2006 at the Israel Museum gift shop.

Four more nights of Chanukah to go!

Blog post and all photos © 2020 mae sander.