Osman Expands His Brand

It seems that making a killing with his four (so far) Thursday Murder Club novels just isn’t enough for English author and TV presenter Richard Osman. The Guardian reports today that he’ll be launching a brand-new mystery series in September:

… We Solve Murders, which is published this autumn, will introduce the father-in-law and daughter-in-law detective duo Steve and Amy Wheeler. The title references the name of the detective agency the pair set up, after Amy, a private security officer, discovers a dead body and a bag of money while working on a remote tropical island. Steve has retired from the police and runs a small investigations agency in a New Forest village where “he’ll do the odd insurance job or finding a lost dog”.

“But if he never sees another murder, I think he’d be very happy,” Osman said, describing the new book to the Guardian. Amy is in her 30s and Steve in his 50s, “so, for me, very young,” he joked. But the fact that Steve is retired appealed to him, he said, as he was interested in the way that just when you think you know what the next stage of your life looks like, “life often has other ideas for you”.

Excited though he may be to introduce his second series, Osman reassures his followers that the aged Thursday Murder Club sleuths will return again soon, probably in a 2025 release. As he tells The Guardian, he intends to continue writing that previous series “‘for as long as people want to read them’. When writing about Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron, ‘I just find myself being entertained by them,’ he said. ‘So I’m not about to kill any of them off.’”