Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series has been one of the publishing phenomena of recent years, and it’s not hard to see why. Smart, warm, wickedly funny, with a cast of older protagonists who are more capable than anyone around them expects. Osman proved something the publishing industry had been slow to accept: older readers don’t want to be patronised, and they don’t want protagonists who are past it.

If the Thursday Murder Club is on your shelf, there’s a good chance the Frankie Armstrong series belongs there too — though it will give you something rather different.

The Osman Appeal

What makes the Thursday Murder Club work isn’t really the mysteries — it’s the characters. Four older people who refuse to be written off, who have accumulated enough experience to see through nonsense, and who apply decades of hard-won expertise to problems that baffle everyone around them. The setting is cosy, the tone is gentle, but the intelligence underneath is sharp.

That combination — experience, wit, and refusal to be underestimated — is enormously appealing. It reflects something true about how sharp minds work at any age.

If You Want the Edges Left In

Frankie Armstrong shares some of that DNA. She is also an outsider who sees more clearly than those around her. She also has the experience that comes from a life actually lived, not a comfortable existence that kept the world at arm’s length.

But where Osman keeps the darkness at a careful distance — cosy is a genre with rules — the Frankie Armstrong series lets it in. The crimes have real stakes. The violence is not politely offstage. Southwest Florida is a beautiful and genuinely dangerous place, and the series treats it as such.

If you’ve finished the Thursday Murder Club books and wanted something with the same intelligence but a harder edge, You Owe Me is the natural next step.

A Protagonist Who Earned Her Skills the Hard Way

Osman’s characters are marvellous, but their expertise is largely professional and intellectual — a spy, a nurse, a union leader, a psychiatrist. Frankie Armstrong’s expertise was earned in warzones. That changes the texture of the tension considerably.

The Frankie Armstrong series is for readers who want the intelligence of the best modern crime fiction, the warmth of a protagonist with real humanity, and a world that doesn’t pretend the rough edges don’t exist.

[Get You Owe Me on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]

— Kerry Costello is the author of the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.