A not so pointless murder

 

by Ben Soton

We Solve Murders: Richard Osman, Penguin, London 2024, 432 pp, Hbk £22, Pbk £9.99

Richard Osman is best known as the co-presenter of the television gameshow Pointless; however in 2020 he branched out into thriller writing with the Thursday Murder Club series.  However, the series, based around a group of elderly characters approaching eighty, may for obvious reasons have a limited lifespan.  Building on the success of his first series Osman appears to be starting a new set of novels, the first being We Solve Murders.         
The book’s main characters are a retired Met detective Steve Wheeler, now living in the New Forest, and his bodyguard daughter-in-law Amy.  Steve lives in the fictional village of Axley, which has strong similarities with the actual village of East Boldre.  Its inhabitants are mostly affluent commuters and retirees and Steve spends much of his time solving minor mysteries, such as money missing from the till in a local shop and the odd missing cat.  The highlight of his week is the pub quiz.       
Amy’s world could not be more different.  Currently working as a body-guard for an international best-selling author, Rosie D’Antonio; she inhabits a world where the higher echelons of organised crime meet the super-rich.  Is there much difference?
These two very contrasting worlds are brought together after a series of murders and an attempt by the real culprit to either frame Amy or have her murdered.  Amy is forced to ask Steve for help.   
It’s an odyssey that takes Rosie, Steve and Amy across the world starting in South Carolina and ending at the pub quiz in Axley.  Steve eventually solves the murder, bringing the guilty parties to justice.  He meanwhile manages to make the transition from the world of a quiet New Forest village to an action-adventure role including private jets, shootings and possibly the opportunity of romance.   
The novel reads more like a complicated word puzzle than a novel and the murderer was the character I suspected. Its interjections about teenage influencers, which I still wonder what they had to do with the murder, do not really help.  The characters did not immediately spike the imagination in the same way as the Thursday Murder Club series.  Meanwhile Osman missed an opportunity to provide Amy with a sufficient back story, which he managed to do with Steve.  However characters sometimes take several novels to fully develop.  The story ends with the possibility of further books. Let’s hope they are better than the first.