11 books like The Thursday Murder Club
What makes The Thursday Murder Club work isn't the body count — it's the company: older amateurs with time on their hands, a village-sized setting and jokes that don't undercut the sadness. These picks come at that from different angles, from cosy English sleuthing gangs to puzzle mysteries that play fair and comic crime with a warm heart.
Updated September 2026
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Amateur sleuthing gangs in small English towns
The Marlow Murder Club by Robert Thorogood 2021
A seventy-something woman assembles her own unofficial investigation team in a Thames-side town, with the same pleasure in mismatched friends pooling their skills; the humour is gentler and the puzzle plotting closer to a traditional village whodunnit.
The Killings at Badger's Drift by Caroline Graham 1987
Same appetite for a picturesque English community with poison under the flowerbeds, and a keen ear for how neighbours talk about each other; this one sits with the professional detective rather than the amateurs.
Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler 2003
Bryant and May are two elderly detectives who refuse to be shuffled aside, and the banter between them has the same affectionate bicker as Elizabeth and Ron; the cases are odder and more macabre, with London's backstreets doing the work the retirement village does for Osman.
Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death by M. C. Beaton 1992
A brisk cosy about an incomer solving a village killing largely to make friends, sharing the comedy of middle-aged social ambition; it's shorter, tarter and far less interested in being moving.
Clever puzzles that play fair and know they're puzzles
Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz 2016
A love letter to golden-age detection with clues planted for you to catch, much as Osman plays with Christie conventions; the structure is a book inside a book, which makes it a chunkier, more intricate read.
Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone by Benjamin Stevenson 2022
Comic crime that keeps the reader in on the joke and the clues both, with a narrator as chatty as Joyce's diary; the tone is sharper and more knowing, and the family is considerably worse company.
The Thirteen Problems by Agatha Christie 1932
An underestimated elderly woman quietly out-thinking everyone in the room — the original template Osman is working from; these are short armchair puzzles rather than one long case with friendships at stake.
The Word Is Murder by Anthony Horowitz 2017
A fair-play investigation carried by the friction between two very different people who need each other, which is the engine of the Thursday Murder Club too; Horowitz writes himself in as the hapless sidekick, so the comedy is more self-mocking.
Later-life sleuths with a past worth hiding
The Windsor Knot by S. J. Bennett 2020
An older woman with decades of discreet intelligence experience solving a death while everyone patronises her — very much Elizabeth's register; the setting is Windsor Castle and the sleuth is the Queen, so the mischief is royal rather than suburban.
Killers of a Certain Age by Deanna Raybourn 2022
Four retirement-age professionals whose old tradecraft turns out to be entirely intact, with the same joke about being invisible after sixty; there's far more action and the violence is done by the heroines.
Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers by Jesse Q. Sutanto 2023
A lonely woman in her sixties runs her own investigation and collects a found family along the way, hitting the warmth and the ache behind the comedy; the mystery is looser and the feeling much more to the fore.
If you also liked…
- Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros
- A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
- Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
- Percy Jackson by Rick Riordan
- 1984 by George Orwell
Questions
- Which one is closest to The Thursday Murder Club?
- The Marlow Murder Club is the nearest match — an older woman and her friends investigating in a comfortable English town. If you want Elizabeth's shadowy past specifically, try The Windsor Knot or Killers of a Certain Age.
- Are these as funny, or just cosy?
- Everyone in My Family Has Killed Someone is the one that will actually make you laugh out loud. Agatha Raisin and the Quiche of Death is comic in a drier, more waspish way.
- Anything sadder, like the dementia thread in The Thursday Murder Club?
- Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers is the most openly tender about loneliness in later life. Full Dark House also carries real grief beneath the double act.