Murder by the river

The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood is one of what is becoming a proliferation of crime novels about groups of older people and their friends who investigate murders – the most famous of these is Richard Osman and I review his novel here but Elly Griffiths has a similar series and you can see my review of one of the titles here.

This book is set by the Thames and our main character Judith is an older woman who enjoys swimming naked in the river at night – she is established early as an eccentric. Judith hears a gunshot at a neighbour’s house (on other side of river from her own). She dutifully reports this to the police. She then finds a body and disagrees with the police’s estimate that it is death by suicide so she starts to investigate. More murders occur. Two other women of varying ages get pulled in to help investigate, one a suppressed, overworked vicar’s wife, the other a huge dog walker. The women become friends. Judith is a compulsive newspaper boarder with a secret and she composes crosswords – in fact, each of the women has a secret or difficulty in their life. Together the women solve the case, occasionally listened to and abetted by a woman police detective. As usual, the women investigating the crime have no authority and quite a weak motive for interfering but they are, of course, more successful than the police.

I wish that I’d liked this book better as I am a fan of cosy crime and stories about groups of improbable friends investigating. I don’t expect books like this to be rooted in reality but this one was very unrealistic in places, especially around police procedure. The three main characters were well written but the other people in the story had little depth and many seemed to be included solely as ill-disguised plot devices. I also didn’t like Judith that much. Those were my particular issues with this novel and they are obviously not shared by others as this is a very successful book and the beginning of an ongoing series. In my opinion, however, there are better novels of a similar type available.