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I really enjoy the Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman, so when he wrote a book that wasn’t in that series, I was interested to see if it was as good – and I do think it was!

So the basic premise is that Amy is a close protection officer, currently looking after a world famous author Rosie on her private island, and Amy’s father-in-law Steve is a retired cop, living in the New Forest. But then various people who are trying to get other people killed get involved, there are influencers, money smugglers, all sorts of things.

And I think this is the only reason I didn’t give it 5 stars (I would have given it 4.5 if that was an option on goodreads) – there are a lot of fringe/secondary characters, and I don’t know if it was that they weren’t given enough intro to bed them into my brain, or if there were just one or two too many of them, but I did have to keep trying to remember who some of them were during the first half, and one of them even later on I was still struggling to place. But I don’t want to be too negative, that really was the only negative for me.

I think Richard Osman’s greatest strength is his characters, and their little eccentricities which really endear them to you. I particularly loved Steve and Rosie this time around, I related to Steve a lot in his desire to potter about somewhere he knows – and Rosie was just so extreme and extravagant in so many ways! The contrast between them was a lot of fun.

What was also enjoyable for me were the bits set in the New Forest, I grew up just outside the national park, and so it was fun to hear references to different places I knew!

As I often do, here are some of my favourite one liners

• “Jeff looks over at Tony, ‘No offence.’
  ‘I never take offence,’ says Tony. ‘Saved me a lot of time over the years.'”
• “Trouble [the cat] never stopped to ask [what flavour his dinner was]; he just loved food that he hadn’t had to catch or scavenge for himself.”
• “What unfortunate timing. If she’d known she was going to die this morning, she would have ordered the pancakes.”
• “‘And how did she score on your psychopath test?’
  ‘Ninety-six, same as me. That’s why she’s Head of HR'”