Antiques dealer Kuldesh Sharma helped the group unravel their last mystery; now, he’s been shot execution-style after receiving a suspicious package. NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • The second volume of The Passenger series, from The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Road • An intimate portrait of grief and longing, as a young woman in a psychiatric facility seeks to . What is truly special in the books are the characters, whose age allows for a beautiful kind of interaction… For all the fizz of jokes and romance, the books carry with them a sense of grief and sadness which becomes much stronger in The Last Devil to Die…The kindness is his books comes out of something greater for Osman. Richard Osman is back with everyone’s favorite mystery-solving quartet, and the second installment of the Thursday Murder Club series is just as clever and warm as the first—an unputdownable, laugh-out-loud pleasure of a read. But I think I’m trying to do something else as well, which is to say I think we’re probably kinder, nicer as human beings than we’re currently being given credit for.

Kuldesh’s murder kickstarts an Elmore Leonard-esque caper plot in which various ­interested ­parties compete to get their hands on a consignment of heroin that had been in his care, resulting in a string of violent deaths alternating with comic set-pieces. Same old/same old, until police from the outside take over the investigation of Kuldesh Sharma’s death. The Thursday Murder Club, an international bestseller, was funny, original, baffling, poignant and thoroughly engaging. The modern classic of space opera that began with Children of Time continues in this extraordinary novel of humanity's battle for survival on a terraformed planet.There may be other aged detectives in print and on television, but for wit, intelligence and humanity, the Thursday Murder Club outranks them all. Osman’s writing reminds me of Anthony Berkeley’s in its mixing of sparkling humor and resonant emotion.

Richard Osman’s first three Thursday Murder Club mysteries are among the 10 bestselling hardback novels since UK records began; I ­suspect only nuclear armageddon or an outbreak of antibiotic-resistant plague can prevent this fourth entry in the series from muscling onto the list. This book does fall down a bit when it comes to the plot: Osman has proved a decent enough plotter in the past, but I suspect a couple of major reveals here will have been foreseen by most readers a few hundred pages in advance. Newport, Rhode Island Murder at the Elms: A Gilded Newport Mystery Book takes place in another century, but similarities abound with life today in the United States. Richard Osman’s engaging series about a group of crime-solving retirees has delighted readers since the first book.

In the end, the murder club books are not really about crime but about friendship and finding ways to stay involved in life. We know by now that outwitting international drug-dealers would be child’s play to the Club’s omnicompetent leader, retired spy Elizabeth, but she has more pressing concerns. His next series will star a police officer who has retired to a quiet life in a sleepy village until his daughter-in-law, a celebrity bodyguard, gets into trouble.