Clara’s Verdict
There is a moment in every Richard Osman novel where you stop trying to identify the killer and simply surrender to the pleasure of being in a room with these people. The Impossible Fortune, Book 5 of the Thursday Murder Club series, delivers that experience reliably and with the accumulated warmth of four prior instalments. At this point I would argue that Osman has identified something specific about what British readers and listeners want from comfort crime: not the procedural satisfaction of a solved puzzle, but the company of people who are old enough to have given up pretending that dignity and urgency are incompatible. Joyce’s table plans and first dances coexist with uncrackable codes and a wedding guest who fears for their life, and neither element undermines the other.
Elizabeth is grieving in this entry, which gives the novel a slightly different emotional texture than its predecessors. Ron is dealing with family troubles. Ibrahim continues his professional and oddly moving arrangement with a criminal he finds genuinely interesting. The four of them reassemble around a mystery involving a villain who wants access to an uncrackable code and will stop at nothing to get it. The plot is Osman’s most mechanism-forward to date, and at least one reviewer finds the twists more predictable than in previous entries, which is a fair point. But the mechanisms are not really why anyone in the Coopers Chase gang’s readership is listening, and Osman knows it.
About the Audiobook
Published by Penguin in September 2025 and running 10 hours and 29 minutes, this is the fifth Thursday Murder Club novel and carries the full weight of an established cast and a loyal audience. The Audible rating of 4.5 from 26 reviews is consistent with the series’ performance across its run. Reviewer Amy, who has read all previous entries, calls it another absolute triumph and notes that each book gets better, while Amazon Customer’s four-star review offers a more measured note: not quite as good as its predecessors, with some twists easier to spot and some threads that go nowhere. Both responses are honest and neither is dismissive.
The novel is narrated by Fiona Shaw, who is explicitly flagged in the promotional material for her roles in Harry Potter, Killing Eve, and Bad Sisters. That is a strong casting signal, and it is justified. Shaw has a theatrical command that suits Elizabeth’s register in particular, and the challenge of an ensemble of four very different personalities is one of the harder tasks in audiobook narration for this kind of comedy crime.
The Narration
Fiona Shaw brings a quality to this narration that the series has not always had in audio. Her ability to differentiate between Joyce’s cheerful practicality, Elizabeth’s careful composure, Ron’s blunt warmth, and Ibrahim’s precise emotional intelligence is genuinely impressive maintained across nearly eleven hours. She does not flatten the comedy or overplay it, which is the central challenge of narrating Osman’s particular brand of cosy crime. The observation from reviewer aka motley about clever misdirection landing successfully is a measure of how well the narration serves the plotting rather than competing with it.
The uncrackable code at the centre of the plot is well-chosen for this series. Osman has always been interested in the puzzle as social object rather than pure mechanism, and the way the code draws different characters into its orbit, each with different skills and different reasons to care about what it contains, is one of the novel’s structural pleasures. Ibrahim’s involvement, in particular, uses his specific professional expertise in a way that feels natural rather than convenient.
What Readers Say
The 26-review sample is consistent in warmth and specific in its pleasures. Amy captures the affection readers have for this cast: the easy rapport, the comedy, a specific reference to Ron’s Pierce Brosnan joke that she found particularly good, and a general sense that this gang gets better the more you know them. Mrs Beverley Needham praises the great personalities and Osman’s writing style. The dissenting voice from Amazon Customer is not dismissive but offers useful calibration: if you have read four previous books and are looking for escalating plot complexity, this entry may feel slightly less ambitious on that axis. If you are reading for the pleasure of the company, it delivers precisely what it always has.
Who Should Listen?
Do not begin here. Start with The Thursday Murder Club, Book 1, where the characters are introduced, the dynamic is established, and the particular pleasure of this series becomes apparent. For readers already in the series, this is the expected pleasure of a fifth encounter with a group of people whose company you have grown to want regularly. Fiona Shaw’s casting is a genuine reason to choose audio over print for this particular entry specifically. For listeners who prefer procedural crime with high plot stakes over character-driven comfort fiction, the Thursday Murder Club has never been quite the right fit and this entry does not change that.
