Literacy 2026: Book 1: The Impossible Fortune

Book
The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman

Series
Book 5 in the Thursday Murder Club series

Synopsis
While the Thursday Murder Club is gathered to celebrate the wedding of Joyce’s daughter Joanna, the best man approaches Elizabeth and asks for her help. Someone has planted a bomb underneath his car, and he wants Elizabeth to help find out who did it. After he goes missing, the gang discovers that he owned one half of a fortune worth hundreds of millions of pounds, locked away in a vault underground. With his disappearance, there’s now a long list of suspicious, dangerous, characters trying to get the fortune for themselves.

Notes
The fourth book felt like an end to the series, so it was appreciated that Osman was careful to note in the afterward that the series wasn’t over, just going on hiatus while he concentrated on different things. This book acknowledges that it’s been a year away, but also quickly settles back into the groove of everything you want from this series.

The books are charming and cozy to a fault, fun and compulsively readable. They’re not thrillers by any stretch — the central mystery is rarely anything remarkable on its own — but I still found myself staying up until 5 AM to finish this one.

And while they are charming and fun, this is the first that had scenes that I thought were genuinely funny. Not laugh-out-loud funny, maybe, but I thought they worked better than the standard “I can see how someone with a more gentle sense of humor than I have would find this absolutely hilarious” that’s typical of these books. There are some winks to the popularity of the series, for instance, Ron saying that his favorite James Bond was Pierce Brosnan, after Brosnan played Ron in the movie adaptation.

It’s really more of a story with various threads that unravel before coming back together satisfyingly, than a typical mystery story. There’s really only one big clue, and you can tell that Osman was immensely proud of it, despite its being almost completely implausible. (But again, implausible clues that only work in novels are a big part of the appeal of these novels). I was a tiny bit disappointed that Osman included passages to stress how the book wasn’t really about the mystery so much as the various other ideas and storylines surrounding it, since it would’ve been stronger if it hadn’t felt the need to make it explicit. But that’s a minor criticism.

The books have all been insightful about treating the elderly like real people with full lives, instead of just old people waiting to die. That’s not stressed as much here, but there are a lot of nice observations about grief, love, and mothers and daughters. I especially appreciated an entire scene devoted to showing how much money is wasted by companies undervaluing employees in “lower” positions; entire systems collapse because people aren’t paid enough to survive and therefore aren’t paid enough to care.

Verdict
One of the strongest of the books, if not the strongest of the mysteries. Settles right back into everything you want from this series, staying just on the right side of being too-cute or too-flippant, and having the right balance of sentimentality and comedy.