Richard Osman Books in Order: The Thursday Murder Club Series Guide (2026)

Most cosy crime fiction asks you to solve a murder. Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series asks something more unexpected: what if the detectives were in their late seventies and eighties, living in a luxury retirement village in Kent, and still sharper than anyone who underestimates them? The answer, it turns out, is a series that became a publishing phenomenon — the fastest-selling debut crime novel in UK history when the first book launched in 2020, and a series that has sold tens of millions of copies worldwide.

The success is easy to understand once you have read a few chapters. Osman has created four protagonists — Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron — who are individually extraordinary and collectively irresistible. The series is funny, warm, and genuinely surprising in its plotting. It is also, quietly, a meditation on ageing, friendship, and what it means to still matter when the world has largely agreed that you should stop. That the books manage this without a trace of sentimentality is a significant achievement.

Quick answer: Read in publication order, starting with The Thursday Murder Club. Each book builds on the relationships established in the previous one, and the ongoing subplots — particularly involving the supporting cast — reward reading them in sequence.

All Richard Osman Thursday Murder Club Books at a Glance

Best starting point: The Thursday Murder Club — it establishes the four characters and the world that the rest of the series builds upon.

Do You Need to Read in Order?

The short answer is: yes, and it will make the books significantly better.

Each Thursday Murder Club novel has a self-contained central murder investigation with its own resolution. You will not feel entirely lost if you pick up book three without reading the earlier ones. But you would be missing a large part of what makes the series work, for two reasons.

The relationships evolve. The dynamic between Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron changes across four books. Loyalties deepen. Vulnerabilities are exposed. Characters who appear peripheral in book one become central to later plots. Reading in order means you arrive at each new development with the emotional context it deserves.

The supporting cast carries ongoing storylines. Two police officers — Detective Sergeant Donna De Freitas and PC Chris Hudson — appear across all four books, and their personal lives develop in ways that the novels treat with genuine seriousness. Bogdan, the handyman at Coopers Chase who becomes the club’s de facto muscle, evolves from a comic supporting character into something considerably more important. These threads only land properly if you have been following them from the start.

The reading order recommendation: Start with book one, read through to four. The series rewards patience, and the payoffs in the later books depend on investment built in the earlier ones.

The Thursday Murder Club Series in Order

#1 — The Thursday Murder Club

Published: 2020

Every Thursday afternoon, a small group of residents at Coopers Chase Retirement Village meet in the Jigsaw Room to do what they have always done: review cold cases from their various past lives in intelligence, psychiatry, trade unionism, and nursing. They have no official standing. They have no jurisdiction. What they do have is time, intelligence, and — as it turns out — an actual murder on their doorstep.

When the property developer planning to build on adjacent land turns up dead, Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron insert themselves into the investigation. Detective Sergeant Donna De Freitas is not especially grateful for the interference, but she quickly realises that these four elderly residents know things that she does not, and that ignoring them would be a mistake.

The debut establishes everything essential: the four characters and their very different personalities, the Coopers Chase setting with its specific social ecosystem, the comic rhythm of the prose, and the genuine plotting intelligence underneath the warmth. It is an enormously confident first novel, and its success was not a fluke.

#2 — The Man Who Died Twice

Published: 2021

The second novel opens with a letter arriving for Elizabeth — from a man she knew in her intelligence career, a man who had supposedly died decades ago. He is not dead. He has, however, lost fifty million pounds’ worth of diamonds belonging to a criminal organisation, and he would very much like some help before the people looking for them find him instead.

The Man Who Died Twice expands the series’ scope considerably. The case involves international organised crime in a way the first book’s local murder investigation did not, and Osman uses the escalation to test his characters in new situations. The novel is also where the Elizabeth backstory deepens in ways that recontextualise everything about her that seemed merely eccentric in book one. Joyce’s diary entries — a structural device introduced in the debut — reach a new level of comic and emotional precision here.

The scale is larger, the stakes are higher, and the plotting is more intricate. It confirms that the first book was not a one-off.

#3 — The Bullet That Missed

Published: 2022

A TV journalist who investigated local corruption was killed years ago. The case was officially ruled an accident. The Thursday Murder Club has always believed otherwise, and when a new murder occurs that connects to the old one, they find themselves working two cases simultaneously — with the added complication of a contract killer who is rather more charming than contract killers are supposed to be.

The Bullet That Missed is the most technically accomplished novel in the series. The dual-timeline structure — the cold case and the present investigation — is handled with more sophistication than it might appear, and the resolution makes use of misdirection that holds up to scrutiny on a reread. It is also where the emotional depth of the series becomes impossible to ignore: Osman writes about memory, loss, and the specific grief of ageing with a lightness of touch that makes it more rather than less affecting.

#4 — The Last Devil to Die

Published: 2023

An antiques dealer who is an old friend of the club is found dead, and an extremely valuable artefact has gone missing along with him. The investigation draws the Thursday Murder Club into the overlap between the antiques trade and the drug trafficking world — a conjunction that Osman handles with the same cheerful improbability he brings to all his plots, while keeping the emotional stakes entirely real.

The Last Devil to Die is the most personal of the four novels. It deals with dementia in a way that is neither flinching nor sentimental, and one storyline in particular — handled with quiet, careful precision — is among the best things Osman has written. The central investigation is characteristically clever, but what lingers is the texture of friendship under pressure: the four club members facing the kinds of losses that come with their age, and continuing anyway.

What Makes the Thursday Murder Club Special

The cast of four. Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron are individually distinct in ways that go beyond their professional backgrounds. Elizabeth is a former intelligence operative of indeterminate seniority who approaches every problem as though it is an information problem. Joyce is a former nurse whose diary narrates significant portions of each book and whose observations about the people around her are sharper than they first appear. Ibrahim is a retired psychiatrist who is interested in process, evidence, and doing things correctly. Ron is a former trade union leader who is interested in doing things quickly and, if necessary, loudly. Together they are not a team so much as a volatile coalition, and the friction between their methods produces the series’ best comic moments.

The Coopers Chase setting. Osman’s fictional retirement village is a social world unto itself — complete with its own hierarchies, gossip networks, and institutional politics. It functions as a version of the classic cosy crime location: the English village where everyone knows everyone, where the past is always present, and where an outsider (the detective) must learn the rules of the community to understand what happened. The difference is that at Coopers Chase, the detectives are insiders, which inverts the usual dynamic entirely.

The cosy tone that earns its warmth. Osman has been described as writing “cosy crime,” which is accurate but can give a misleading impression. The books are warm and funny, yes — but the warmth is not naive. Characters die. Characters lose people. The threat of loss runs through all four novels, growing more insistent as the series progresses. What the books refuse to do is treat these losses as mere plot mechanics. The emotional intelligence of the writing gives the cosiness its weight.

The plotting actually works. This sounds like a low bar, but it is not. Cosy crime often sacrifices puzzle-plotting for character and atmosphere. Osman does not. The mysteries in each book are constructed with genuine care, the clues are present before the solution, and the resolutions hold up under scrutiny. Readers who approach the series with low expectations for the actual mystery will be pleasantly surprised.

What to Read After the Thursday Murder Club

If the Thursday Murder Club has converted you to cosy crime and mystery fiction, two good places to go next are our guide to the best mystery books of all time and the broader cosy crime tradition — authors like Alexander McCall Smith, whose No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series shares the Thursday Murder Club’s interest in community, character, and crimes that do not require darkness to be interesting.

For readers who want to stay in the world of British crime fiction with a slightly sharper edge, our best mystery books guide covers the full range from classic Golden Age detective fiction to contemporary literary crime.

Frequently Asked Questions

Do the Thursday Murder Club books need to be read in order?

Yes — reading in publication order is strongly recommended. While each novel has a self-contained central case, the relationships between Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron deepen across all four books, and there are ongoing subplots involving Bogdan, Donna, and Chris that carry forward from book to book. Starting with The Thursday Murder Club gives you the full emotional payoff.

How many Thursday Murder Club books are there?

There are four Thursday Murder Club novels as of 2026: The Thursday Murder Club (2020), The Man Who Died Twice (2021), The Bullet That Missed (2022), and The Last Devil to Die (2023). Richard Osman has confirmed the series will continue, and a fifth book is anticipated.

Is The Thursday Murder Club suitable for all ages?

Yes, broadly. The series is written for adults but is free of graphic violence, explicit content, or anything likely to disturb younger readers. The tone is warm and gently comic, making it popular across a wide age range. It is frequently recommended to readers who enjoy a cosy crime atmosphere — puzzles, charm, and wit over darkness and gore.

What genre is the Thursday Murder Club?

The Thursday Murder Club is cosy crime — a subgenre of mystery fiction characterised by amateur detective protagonists, a sense of community and warmth, and murder investigations that prioritise wit and puzzle-solving over violence and trauma. Osman’s series sits in a tradition that includes Agatha Christie and Alexander McCall Smith, though it has a distinctly modern sensibility.

Will there be more Thursday Murder Club books?

Yes. Richard Osman has indicated the series will run to at least five books. As of mid-2026, the fifth book has not yet been published. Osman has discussed his plans for the series in various interviews, and the global success of the first four novels makes further instalments highly likely.

For the full Richard Osman bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Richard Osman author page on Editors Reads.

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