Mystery series: Marlow Murder Club

Happy Friday everyone and after all the quiet of December we have loads of new releases starting to come through and so today’s post is about one of the series that I’ve been enjoying which has a new instalment out this week: The Marlow Murder Club.

In the first book, Judith, who is in her late 70s and is a crossword setter for The Times, witnesses a murder while out swimming in the Thames and when the police don’t believe her, sets out to solve the crime with the help of local dog walker Suzie and Becks, the vicar’s wife. In books two and three they’re investigating the deaths of local grandees and gaining a certain amount of local notoriety as well as a a grudging alliance with one of the local detectives. The new book, Murder on the Marlow Belle features the local amateur dramatic group, whose founder member is found dead the morning after a river cruise with the group’s most famous former member. And it has the bonus of one of the characters being called Verity, which is always fun, although Veritys don’t have a great record in murder mysteries – Verity is after all the victim whose murder Miss Marple is trying to solve in Nemesis.

I particularly like this series because one of my ex-boyfriends lived in Marlow so I spent a bit of time around there over the years and it’s always fun when places that you’ve lived in or know well are in Books! More than that, these is just so easy to read – a bit like the Richard Osmans are, although in a different style. They’re written by Robert Thorogood who also came up with the idea for the death in Paradise TV series and books. We watched a lot of Death in Paradise over Christmas and you’ll be glad to hear that the books are a bit more complicated than Death in Paradise episode but you can see a lot of the same sort of things going on here.

There was a TV adaptation of the first book last year and they needed two episodes to get through all the plot. They’ve made a couple of changes for the TV series – for example Samantha Bond is at least a decade younger than Book Judith and is playing her as more her own age than the book. And as I said when I wrote that post about the adaptation I find them more obviously comedic on TV – in fact it’s almost too cringe for me. But in the books I don’t notice that and I really like them. Of course it does post a question of what’s gonna happen with when the Thursday Murder Club comes out as a movie. What am I going to notice in the adaptation that I didn’t in books and am I going to enjoy that as a movie as much as I enjoy the books. But we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.

Anyway, you should be able to get hold of any of these pretty easily, I’ve seen them all over the shops. My copy came from NetGalley – hence why I’m up to date for once! As I said at the top, the new one came out yesterday, so you can get that on Kindle and Kobo now, and the other three are at reasonable prices as ebooks at the moment too: here are the Kindle and Kobo links to those too. And indeed there’s already a preorder link up for an as yet untitled fifth book – due this time next year!

Have a great weekend everyone