In the middle of colder days and longer nights, this book was a ray of sunshine and delight.
Osman’s septuagenarian sleuths who meet every Thursday in the Jigsaw Room of their retirement community (hence the name “The Thursday Murder Club’) have become quite adept and tenacious at investigating unsolved murder cases. The members of the group rely on their wide ranging experience; a police officer, a psychiatrist, a nurse, a scientist, a union agitator and one who seems to have many friends in many high places in government, to help untangle these unsolved mysteries.
But when a local developer and his partner are killed under suspicious circumstances, The Thursday Murder Club decides that they will investigate. While their methods are unorthodox and the police are skeptical, this brilliant group begins to make some headway into solving the murders, until another body is discovered.
Osman hits all the right notes. He is witty but never patronizing. His characters are three-dimensional who carry the accumulation of both joy and regret which comes from living long, full lives, but instead of wallowing in the past they are living life to its fullest and finding ways to be both relevant and helpful.
This was a delightful read. I hope we hear more from the Thursday Murder Club!
Brenda’s Rating: ****(4 out of 5 Stars)
Recommend this book to: Sharon, Marian, Lauren and Keith.
Book Study Worthy? Yes!
Read in ebook format.
Sam Gaddis, a recently divorced British academic, is in debt and needs tuition money for his daughter’s private school. His only new source for funds is to write a bestseller. Unfortunately his last book on Russia, although well received by academia, did not sell any where close to the volume needed to meet his current financial needs. In this moment of crises, Sam gets a call from an investigative journalist who he has helped in the past, asking if he would like to collaborate with her on a new book about a possible sixth member of the notorious Trinity spy ring, who included Kim Philby and Anthony Blunt. Elated at the possibilities, both academically and financially, Sam jumps at the chance. Unfortunately, within hours of their meeting, and before they have been able to share much information, the journalist is found dead of an apparent heart attack.
Our narrator is an interpreter who has just landed a very important job at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Although unnamed, we quickly begin to know her intimately as she reveals her desire to escape New York and her family and her relief in landing this job. We see her interact with her colleagues and her friend, Jana and as well as her growing attachment to her married, but separated, boyfriend, Adrain. We are also pulled into her work in a courtroom in The Hague where she has been assigned to be the interpreter for a former president who is accused of brutal war crimes. She came to The Hague to escape, but as she becomes more intimate with Jana and Adrain and when her work reveals the brutality and banality of true evil, she comes to understand that you cannot really escape what is inside, until you are willing to confront and choose the things you want.
Daisy Jones has an extraordinary voice and wants to sing. The Six, an established band led by Billy Dunne, are just on the cusp of making it big; they just need that special something to catapult them to the top of the charts. The band’s producer thinks Daisy’s voice is just the thing that will make that happen. But art and artists are unpredictable and what looks good on paper and sounds incredible on the radio, can also be threatening and explosive.
It has been ten years since the pilgrims arrived on the Mayflower and formed the colony of Plymouth. Although the colony was supposedly founded on the idea of religious freedom, Puritans have imposed strict rules that restrict the settlers from trading with whom they choose, living the way they choose and worshipping the way they choose. Out numbered, the Anglicans in the colony have been marginalized by the more zealous Puritans, so it is with some anticipation and hope that they welcome a new ship bringing more colonists and new directives concerning the management of the colony. Instead the ship and the new colonists bring even more tension and when a murder occurs, the trial reveals the true depths of the moral decrepitude in this seemingly God fearing colony.
Nora Seed is very unhappy and disappointed with her life and wonders if she might be more happy and fulfilled if she had made different choices. Suddenly she finds herself in the Midnight Library, a place where you can check out the volumes of your life where you made different choices than the life you are currently living. When she check out these volumes she begins living those lives, trying them on and seeing if she might want to change her current life for this new one.
Omeir, a farm boy, was conscripted by the invading army, along with his beloved oxen, to carry the machines of war to the walls of Constantinople. In the aftermath, his oxen dead and traumatized by the horrors of war, Omeir begins his journey back to his village. Along the way, he literally runs into Anna, a thirteen year old orphan fleeing the city. He soon finds that she is carrying with her pages from an amazing book about Atheon who longs to be turned into a bird so he can find utopia in the sky. Omeir is entranced by the story, but knows that the villagers who do not know how to read will not understand such magic. Fearing for Anna’s life, they hide the book carefully in the an old tree and only get it out occasionally to share with their children.
This book is set in 1779, during the revolutionary war. Claire and Jamie have been reunited with their daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger and their children after they made the perilous journey through the stones and away from dangers they encountered in the 20th century. Although Frasers Ridge, where Jamie and Claire have settled, is located in the back country of North Carolina, the winds of war are sweeping closer and closer. Meanwhile, not too far away, William Ransom, Lord John’s heir, is trying to come to terms with the knowledge of his real father’s identity.
Hannah Hall had almost given up on love and then she met Owen Michaels. They quickly fell in love and got married and although Owen’s, teenage daughter, Bailey, was not thrilled with her as a stepmother, Hannah felt that in the last year they had made some progress or at least had entered a detente in their relationship.
New life is also the topic of Jane Smiley’s new book Perestroika in Paris. This is a lovely book-almost a novella at just 270 pages, but she packs in so many thoughts and ideas in those pages that it feels much longer.
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