I read The Thursday Murder Club before Netflix film comes out - and it is my biggest disappointment of 2025

The Thursday Murder Club neatly dovetails with my own personal reading journey. Growing up I was a real book worm, once having to desperately hunt for a novel in English after finishing all of my holiday reads.

Over the years, however, I drifted away and maybe picked-up one or two books a year. If that. At least, until the Covid-19 pandemic came around and I found myself getting back into the habit.

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The year I started to delve back into the reading world was the same that The Thursday Murder Club burst onto the scene. It had, unsurprisingly, been on my need-to-read list for almost five years and the arrival of the Netflix film seemed like the perfect excuse to pick it up and dive in.

Unfortunately, it has ended up being my biggest disappointment of 2025. Let me explain why:

I hate the short chapters

Until I’d picked up The Thursday Murder Club, I hadn’t ever really given much thought to chapter length. Beyond flicking ahead to see if it is reasonable to finish one before bed or if that would be too ambitious.

However, quickly into my read of the Richard Osman book, I started to find myself getting exasperated by how short the chapters were. In a 300-odd page book, there are over 100 - meaning most are between one and three pages long.

I can’t count the number of times I found myself getting into a character's point of view only to turn over the page and find that the chapter was done. It just destroyed my sense of immersion and put me on a negative footing from pretty much the off.

Too much tell, not enough show

Perhaps this one is on me, I have in the last 24 months or so made a real effort to diversify my reading habits and challenge myself. Taking on Anna Karenina, for example, as well as works from acclaimed writers like William Golding, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ted Chiang.

It means that I have a lower tolerance now for works that show but don’t tell. Let me see how a character solves a mystery, don’t just tell us later on that they have.

The Thursday Murder Club does have some wonderful bits of characterisation, especially when it comes to Ian Ventham. However, I often found that it would go onto to overexplain and tarnish the moments.

One in particular came pretty early, when Ian is in a Waitrose and asks if the coffee is FairTrade before responding “shame” to the answer. If the book had left it at that it is a perfect moment, you fully get a sense of what kind of person Ian is, but instead it adds a line about him not wanting to pay extra for someone he’ll never meet (start of chapter eight, page 36 in my edition).

It felt like an extremely neat moment that captured what kind of person Ian is and it had just been watered down by that extra sentence. As if the book was scared that the readers would miss it.

The book is also quick to tell us what fantastic investigators The Thursday Murder Club are, without ever actually seeing it. I was shocked that we didn’t get a moment to see them crack a cold case before the book’s main plot kicked-in.

Neither one, nor the other

The Thursday Murder Club feels, at least in my opinion, like it is caught between wanting to be two different books. It is both a slice-of-life work in a retirement village about how life doesn't end when you are no longer in the work force, as well as being a cozy-ish murder mystery.

But it never truly feels like it commits properly to either. Perhaps because the chapters are so short and it jumps around in perspective so much, you don’t get the chance to settle before you are moved to somewhere else.

Too often I felt like major developments in the murder plot line occurred off-screen. While I was also left longing for more quiet moments in the day-to-day lives of the Thursday Murder Club members.

Perhaps it is a balance that will be better struck in the other three books. One day, maybe, I will discover.

The Thursday Murder Club is not bad, just disappointing

If this book was actively bad, I wouldn’t have felt as annoyed as I did reading it. It is the missed potential that I found most disappointing.

I could see the shape of a novel that would be truly delightful and memorable, but it needs to take a trip to the Jigsaw Room to be fully assembled. There are pitch perfect moments and laugh-out-loud bits, dashed by the constant chopping and cutting every other page.

Personally, in terms of cozy British crime books, I vastly preferred my time reading Susie Dent’s Guilty By Definition this year. Which, I don’t think I would have expected when I cracked open The Thursday Murder Club.

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