What happens next sets Elizabeth and the rest of the elderly club members on the trail of a case that will tax their disparate skills to the very limit. Is she going to accept his invitation? You bet she is! Because on their last acquaintance at the side of the River Thames, Marcus was dead. Although it was the winter of 1981 when they last met, former spy Elizabeth remembers Marcus Carmichael very well indeed. Unbeknown to the others, she’s received a letter from a former colleague who is about to move into a flat in Coopers Chase and has invited her around for a drink.
It’s a pretty lively affair, the conversation ebbing and flowing along with the wine – but Elizabeth seems a little preoccupied. It’s enough to interest the foursome for a short while, but they’re still on the crest of a wave of success after their last case concluded so spectacularly, so rather than digging in too deep, they go off for lunch in the restaurant in the Coopers Chase seniors community where they all live. The man had gone to trial and walked free, his record unblemished – although a short time later, the police uncovered the fact that the dead man had been dating the shopkeeper’s teenage daughter. It opens just a few days after the finale of The Thursday Murder Club – the following Thursday, in fact – and Joyce, Ron, Ibrahim and Elizabeth have just finished looking at the cold case of a Hastings newsagent who murdered an intruder with a crossbow back in the mid-1970s. But how would the Difficult Second Book fare? Never fear readers, Mr Osman has it all sewn up – and if anything, The Man Who Died Twice is a better read than his debut. So book number one was a publishing sensation. Could this incomer cut the mustard? Book sales of more than a million copies since The Thursday Murder Club was published in September last year, and 45 weeks at the top of the fiction bestseller lists answered that question, in spades. The man is a TV gameshow phenomenon in the UK, but questions were raised when Richard Osman announced he was writing a crime novel.
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