A NOTE ON THE SPOILERS
A while ago I got a comment tantrum from a semiliterate rando because apparently some people are too stupid to understand a SPOILER WARNING, so I thought I’d elaborate on my exact definition of a spoiler. I AM GOING TO SUMMARIZE THE ENTIRE BOOK, INCLUDING THE ENDING. Think of me as a very niche Wikipedia. If you have a problem with that, you are welcome to stop reading at any time. I don’t make money from this content. I don’t care how many people read it.
This is your legacy, Fedup: an extra line on an obscure book blog that probably doesn’t even have ten followers. It’s not exactly a Nobel prize, but it’s still quite a nifty little achievement. Your parents must be so proud. Please seek help.
The Last Devil to Die
Richard Osman
You’re off the edge of the map, mate. Here there be spoilers. Other reviews in this series can be found here.
Last review I said that Mervyn would not be Joyce’s Mr. Right, and I have no notes because that was a flawless prediction. He’s not even Mr. Right Now. What a pill. I really can’t blame him for walking into a scam that is typically effective against the lonely and the isolated, but in this house we do not disrespect the Thursday Murder Club. For heaven’s sake, she can do better than him.
Joyce’s appalling taste in men aside, the holidays around Coopers Chase are sort of merry. Joyce’s daughter Joanna comes to visit, bringing along her beau, while Ron feuds with Pauline over the most appropriate time of day to open Christmas presents, and ends up on a break from her. The Club invites Mervyn to join their Christmas lunch, but he seems uninterested in socializing and is deep into an online relationship with a stock-photo-attractive woman named Tatiana, who supposedly lives in Lithuania and has sweet-talked him into sending her £5,000. Things pick up on New Year’s Eve thanks to one Bob Whittaker, a friendly computer-savvy loner who hires out the lounge and the big screen and invites his fellow residents to watch the countdown on Turkish TV. Since Turkey is several hours ahead of the UK, everyone is able to celebrate the turn of the year while still getting to bed before ten, which makes Bob a real class act. Unfortunately, the holidays are not kind to everyone: two days after Christmas, 80-year-old antique dealer Kuldesh Sharma – a good friend of Stephen Best, which makes him a good friend of the Thursday Murder Club – is shot to death in a lonely stretch of woods. The Club attends his funeral and pays their respects, then settles down to the serious business of solving his murder. Ibrahim and Ron also take over the task of talking to Tatiana, who wants Mervyn to send her another £2,800 through her friend Jeremmy, though Bob quickly notices that Tatiana and Jeremmy use the same IP address.
During their preliminary research, the Club learns that Kuldesh had recently received a small box of heroin worth £100,000 from Dominic “Dom” Holt, second-in-command to heroin dealer Mitch Maxwell, but that the box went missing before it could be retrieved by the next link in the chain. Their only clue to its whereabouts are two calls made by Kuldesh shortly before his death, one to an unknown number and one to Nina Mishra, an art history professor at the University of Kent, daughter of a pair of unsuccessful antique dealers who were friends with Kuldesh. This normally is the point where they would start butting heads with and withholding evidence from DCI Chris Hudson and PC Madonna “Donna” De Freitas, but Chris and Donna get the case yanked from under their feet when aggressively unpopular Senior Investigating Officer (SIO) Jill Regan of the National Crime Agency (NCA) swoops down on Kent and completely takes over, to the point of commandeering Chris’s own office and banishing him to a frigid Portakabin (or what I grew up calling a trailer). Jill is rude, condescending, and abrasive, so everybody hates her and a lot of people are rooting against her, but she is also high enough on the chain of command to relegate Chris and Donna to a case of stolen horses. They do this reluctantly, but they also start sneaking around (ostensibly behind Jill’s back; in actuality with her full knowledge) and behaving in a manner more befitting the members of the Thursday Murder Club as they try to solve the mystery before Jill can.
While the Club and the police investigate, Elizabeth grapples with a different problem: Stephen’s dementia has progressed to the point where he doesn’t always recognize the people around him, even Elizabeth, and he frequently talks about Kuldesh as if he is still alive. During a moment of lucidity, he speaks honestly to Elizabeth, acknowledging his condition and asking her to help him remember it from day to day. His memories of the distant past appear to remain intact, but the present is a puzzle, though there are some consistent threads: he always feels safe when Bogdan is present, and he takes great interest in the activities of Coopers Chase’s resident fox, named Snowy for the little white tips on his ears. When Snowy finally fails to visit, Stephen and Bogdan go looking for him, and learn that he has died. During the funeral that follows, Stephen says a final goodbye to his friends of the Thursday Murder Club, though he only genuinely recognizes Joyce and identifies Ibrahim as Kuldesh. Back home, with Elizabeth by his side and Dvořák on the gramophone, he performs the injection that carries him away from this world and into the next.
I would’ve crawled into a hole in the ground and ordered Bogdan to dig me up when I felt better, maybe in about a century. Elizabeth is not me. Murders are her bread and butter. By now the case has ballooned from just the one murder to a tangled web around the missing heroin, which is being hotly pursued by Connie Johnson (from prison); art forger Samantha Barnes and her young husband, a mountainous Canadian appropriately named Garth, who has a short attention span and frequently threatens to throw people out of windows; Luca Buttaci, a prominent heroin dealer and longtime friend of Mitch Maxwell; and, of course, Mitch Maxwell himself, who is in some pretty serious shit. He has already been having supply chain issues, with many of his recent shipments getting seized by the police, but the loss of this latest shipment has brought down the threat of the wrath of Sayed, the heroin producer who shipped it in the first place. His displeasure is relayed through the arrival of his underling Hanif, who is currently having a good time in London but is more than ready to kill Mitch if the shipment doesn’t conveniently turn up. There’s a lot of players and a lot of moving parts, but there is one large question that hovers quietly over the board as the investigation continues and people start turning up dead: why does everyone care so much about a relatively puny amount of heroin?
Elizabeth stumbles upon the answer during the dead of night, when despite – or perhaps because of – her grief she realizes that Stephen spent his final days talking about seeing Kuldesh because he had, in fact, recently seen him. As an antiquarian, Kuldesh recognized that the heroin was tucked into a box of incomprehensible value, a 6,000-year-old artifact that by rights should have been on display in a museum in Baghdad; but he didn’t know what to do, so he called Stephen and Nina for advice, and ultimately brought the box to Coopers Chase, where he and Stephen buried it for safekeeping. With the box and the heroin safely in hand (sort of – Joyce stashes the heroin in her microwave because it wouldn’t fit in the kettle, and cleans up the box and uses it to store cleaning supplies under her sink and I can only imagine the massive heart attack every archaeologist in the world would have if they heard that my god it’s lucky she didn’t accidentally destroy the box), the Club arranges a sting and invites Jeremmy to Coopers Chase. Initially disbelieving, Jeremmy gleefully agrees to buy the heroin from them for £5,000, which they have him pay directly into Mervyn’s account, and then leaves with what he believes will be a £95,000 windfall, but walks straight into Donna’s hands.
The next visitors are Garth (now solo after Samantha was murdered in their home, and grieving in his own way) and Mitch Maxwell, who threaten to murder everybody unless they are given the box. Joyce cheerfully informs them that she did not know the value of the box, and that she put it out for the garbagemen to take to the dump. Garth takes this news philosophically; Mitch does not. After disposing of the heroin, Elizabeth and Joyce take the box to the University of Kent, where Elizabeth consults with Professor Jonjo Mellors, Nina’s boss. Midway through their meeting, Joyce pulls the fire alarm, and the building clears. While everyone is out of the office, Nina sneaks in and steals the box, then arranges to sell it to Garth for £5M. She gets an unpleasant surprise when Garth tricks her into confessing to the murder of Kuldesh and records their conversation, which he then hands over to Elizabeth before fleeing the country. Meanwhile, Mitch gives his family instructions to flee to Paraguay and heads straight to the dump, where he dies of a heart attack while frantically searching for the box.
While Mitch expires on a heap of garbage, Hanif – waiting at the airport for Mitch to arrive with the box – realizes that neither Mitch nor the box are forthcoming, and that Sayed will kill him if he returns to Afghanistan. On the bright side, he has options in hedge funding and politics, so he’s not completely in the shit. As for the box, it was supposed to go to some Swedish guy in Staffordshire who offered Sayed £10M for it (HENRIK WHY DO YOU NEED A 6,000-YEAR-OLD BOX OMG WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO WITH YOU), so it’s been a pretty bad day for everyone who had money involved. Others have profited: Connie Johnson has signed a contract with Sayed, and, with the deaths of both Luca Buttaci and Mitch Maxwell, she is now the primary heroin dealer in her region, though she feels guilty for arranging the murders of Samantha Barnes and Dom Holt and knows that Ibrahim (now her regular therapist) would not like this if he knew of it. On the police side of things, SIO Regan gets into a bad spot over her failure to find the heroin, made worse by the death of Buttaci, who was actually working for her, but Chris and Donna save her career and they all become friends – provisionally, I am sure. But at least the box is now safely where it belongs, and it even had one final task: per Elizabeth’s request, it carried Stephen’s ashes to the museum in Baghdad, which he often spoke of visiting.
I really was so hoping that the murderer wouldn’t turn out to be Nina, but I got a bad feeling about her when she said she hated her job, and this feeling was confirmed when she mentioned “renting” a dress from ASOS (i.e., buying it, wearing it, and then returning it the next day). There’s just this feeling you get when you’re talking to a person whose every problem can be solved with money, especially a person like Nina, who got stuck teaching art history to the kind of students who complain about left-wing academics rewriting Roman history and threaten to report her for “privilege-shaming,” and only agree to do their homework when a brawny chest-beating Canadian threatens to murder them if they do not. I understand the motive, and the desire for something better. I do not understand killing Kuldesh. Though she claims that Kuldesh didn’t have much longer to live anyway and that human life is not sacred in the grand scheme of things – which it certainly isn’t – this does not excuse her cold-blooded murder of a deeply trusting 80-year-old friend, for which she prepared by watching YouTube videos of vets putting down horses. Her bad attitude manages to disgust even Garth, which if you know anything about Garth should really tell you something about Nina’s level of psychopathy. Luca Buttaci would not have died if Garth hadn’t tossed him off the roof of a parking garage, or at least he would probably have died less painfully if Connie Johnson had been able to get her hands on him, but Garth at least acknowledges that this was bad of him and is prepared to die without complaint if somebody later tosses him off the roof of a parking garage.
My general thoughts on Garth are ambiguous because he’s such an odd character, but he’s also kinda relatable in some respects. He is an eye-for-an-eye kind of guy, even as it applies to himself, which I respect; stoic without being flat, reserved in his emotions but not above establishing dominance by roaring and beating his chest when some shitty spoiled kid in Nina’s office needs to get taken down a peg, but also not too macho to admit when he’s met his match. Elizabeth, for instance. Or the Coopers Chase parking committee lady. He threatens almost everybody with death but never actually tries to harm any member of the Thursday Murder Club, and even likes the gentle homeyness he sees when he breaks into Joyce’s flat. He seems to be a loving husband to Samantha, though he isn’t particularly expressive; and yet he does have a soft side, a side that loves animals (he donated £700,000 to an animal shelter and quickly falls in love with Joyce’s dog Alan) and offers random acts of kindness to strangers. Kindness isn’t a thing he really understands, but he understands enough to behave more kindly in memory of Samantha, who would have done the same thing. This obviously does not balance out everything else he does throughout the book, but it’s enough to make me interested in seeing him again in future books. I don’t know if he’s actually going to go to Italy, which would make him a little geographically undesirable, though no one seems to be out of reach for Elizabeth. While I can’t really see him becoming a regular consultant for the Thursday Murder Club, I wouldn’t say no to another adventure or two.
As for the rest of the characters, it seems like I fall more in love with them with every book. I have been loving the inclusion of Bob, a gentle soul who seems thrilled just to be included in the Club’s activities, and, while this does make me sad for him, I am glad that he and Ibrahim are becoming friends (and maybe something more, in time?). I would like to hear more about Ibrahim’s relationship with Marius, an old lover; I hope in time he will be comfortable enough to tell the rest of his friends about Marius. I am so glad that Ron and Pauline get back together, because they might be ridiculous but they were definitely made for each other. For Joyce, I’m sorry Mervyn didn’t work out the way she wanted him to, but now she’s met newcomer Edwin Mayhem (I don’t care if his name is really Mayhew I’m calling him Mayhem) and he seems more agreeable, and he’s just asked her if she’s part of any clubs, so I suspect great things are ahead for the both of them. At the same time, this had better be an expansion of the club and not a replacement, because if Bob and Edwin are being introduced as replacements for any of the four original members, I will be having words with Osman.
The worst part of the book was the death of Stephen, but it wasn’t unexpected and it was gently handled. It was particularly moving when he asked Elizabeth if Bogdan was their son, because, to be perfectly honest, they could not have had a better one. I am glad that Stephen had the time to say goodbye to everyone who loved him, and that he still had the wherewithal to make the decision for himself. I appreciate the inclusion of Joyce’s contrasting opinion, shared via her diary; but I also appreciate her ability to recognize that Stephen made his choice, and that it was in the end his choice to make. I grieve for Stephen, but this was a far better end than the one given to John and Penny Gray. At the very least Elizabeth is not alone, and she knows it. Her friends are ready and eager to support her when she needs it, and new friends keep joining them; just look at the last three books. Now, I will admit that I am sore over the death of Snowy the fox, but this too isn’t entirely without padding; his funeral was lovely, and it was so sweet to see the number of people who turned out to say goodbye to him, the number of names he had been given.
With all of that said, The Bullet That Missed is still my favorite Thursday Murder Club. Like, sorry, but the other three don’t have a towering Viking Millennial with a heart of gold. But The Last Devil to Die is a very close second because it just has so much heart, even with the extraordinarily heartless Nina. Even SIO Regan doesn’t seem so bad once you get to know her. At a minimum, the door has been opened for her, and I’m hoping she’ll step through it. It was nice to see her getting along better with Chris and Donna, even after she tossed Chris out of his office and Donna called her an idiot. (Also I think it’s hilarious that Chris actually stood up on his hind legs this book and informed Elizabeth that he doesn’t work for her. You’re wrong, but you keep telling yourself that, sweets.) I suppose in the fifth book we’ll start working on the next lesson: no matter how big and bad you think you are, you don’t mess with the Thursday Murder Club.
