Clara’s Verdict
When The Thursday Murder Club arrived in 2020, I was sceptical. Celebrity novelist, cosy crime, retirement community sleuths: all the signifiers of the kind of book the publishing industry manufactures to a formula and markets to death. I was wrong. Osman’s debut had genuine wit and something more surprising: an emotional intelligence about ageing, friendship, and what it means to still feel alive in the last chapters of life. The Man Who Died Twice, its sequel, takes everything that worked and sharpens it. Several reviewers have called it better than the first book, and after listening to Lesley Manville deliver the whole thing, I think they are right.
What Osman has understood is that cosy crime is not a lesser form of crime fiction; it is a different one. The cosiness is not an absence of stakes. It is a particular way of holding stakes, within a framework that insists on decency and warmth as values worth defending. The Man Who Died Twice does not abandon that framework. It tests it with some of the darkest material Osman has yet brought to Coopers Chase.
About the Audiobook
Book 2 in the Thursday Murder Club Mysteries series, The Man Who Died Twice returns to Coopers Chase retirement village, where Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim, and Ron form one of crime fiction’s more improbable but entirely convincing detective teams. The case this time involves stolen diamonds, a violent mobster, and an old intelligence contact of Elizabeth’s who has made rather a large mistake and urgently needs help. Bodies begin accumulating with the cheerful regularity that Coopers Chase residents have come to accept as occupational hazard.
Osman’s achievement is to write crime fiction that takes both the crime and the comedy seriously without letting either undermine the other. He also writes about friendship and mortality with an unshowy accuracy that can catch you off guard: a sentence will arrive that you think is setting up a joke and it turns out to be doing something else entirely. The 12 hours and 30 minutes runtime, published by Penguin in September 2021, allows the novel’s various strands enough room to develop at a comfortable pace. The rating of 4.7 from 109 Audible UK listeners reflects an audience that has already committed to these characters and found the second outing more than satisfying. The introduction of new complications to the emotional landscape of Coopers Chase is handled with care; Osman does not introduce darkness for its own sake.
Reviewers who came to the book expecting a light entertainment and found something more affecting have been among the most enthusiastic. The novel appears to take its characters’ age seriously in a way that the first book only gestured toward, and the result is a richer, more emotionally resonant experience.
The Narration
Lesley Manville is the kind of performer who makes you feel that she has understood each character from the inside before she opens her mouth. Elizabeth’s ironclad composure, Joyce’s determined cheerfulness, Ibrahim’s philosophical precision, Ron’s blunt warmth: Manville differentiates them without resorting to vocal caricature, and the ensemble feels genuinely inhabited rather than performed. Her timing on the comic sequences is excellent; her handling of the more emotionally weighted passages is even better. The combination of Osman’s dialogue and Manville’s delivery is one of the more pleasurable listens in contemporary British crime fiction, and the casting appears to have become definitional for how readers experience these characters.
What Readers Say
Listeners who came from the first book found the sequel more polished and more emotionally resonant. One reviewer described it as « beautifully written with dialogue that makes you smile, a breath of fresh air, » and praised the series for being « refreshingly different » within a crime genre that can feel overcrowded with grimmer material. Another, who had previously found the first book good but not quite great, considered the sequel a significant step up: « more polished and accomplished than its forerunner. » The humour is consistently cited as landing well, with several readers mentioning laughing aloud, while the emotional undercurrents were praised for adding depth rather than simply raising stakes. A note of caution: the 4.7 rating comes from 109 Audible UK listeners rather than a broader sample, which likely reflects the audience of engaged Thursday Murder Club devotees rather than newcomers.
Who Should Listen?
Anyone who finished The Thursday Murder Club and wants more of the same, but better. Also suitable for readers of cosy crime who are tired of books that forget the crime. Osman’s plots are properly constructed and the mysteries properly satisfying. Less suited to listeners who want their crime relentlessly dark. This is warm-hearted work, and unapologetically so. Start with Book One if you have not already; the character dynamics become considerably richer in context, and the emotional payoffs in the second book depend on knowing what came before.
