Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series has introduced a new generation of readers to the pleasures of the old-fashioned murder mystery: the puzzle, the carefully drawn community of characters, the satisfaction of watching intelligent people work through a problem that has defeated everyone else. If you have read all four Thursday Murder Club novels and are wondering where to go next, The Long Game by Kerry Costello is worth your attention.
It will give you something recognisably similar — and something quite different.
What the Two Share
Both books are rooted in the conviction that the best crime fiction is about character as much as crime. The Thursday Murder Club works because its four protagonists are vivid, fully realised people whose company is a pleasure in its own right. The Long Game works for the same reason. Detective Sergeant Gibson is the kind of detective you want to spend time with — not glamorous, not infallible, but genuinely intelligent and quietly tenacious in a way that feels real rather than fictional.
Both books are also firmly placed in communities that are drawn with real care. Osman’s retirement village is a specific world with its own rules, relationships and social fabric. Kerry Costello’s Swinton and Pendlebury — the mining communities of the North West in the postwar decades — is equally specific, and the crimes grow directly from the life of that community rather than being imposed on it from outside.
What Makes The Long Game Different
Where the Thursday Murder Club is warm and occasionally whimsical, The Long Game is cooler and darker. The murders in Osman’s books tend to be recent; in The Long Game, the roots of the killing reach back to the Second World War. Osman’s comedy of community is replaced by a tragedy of community — what happens when the bonds that tie people together are used against them.
The Long Game also takes the procedural element of crime fiction more seriously. Gibson’s investigation is methodical in a way that reflects real detective work: dead ends, wrong turns, the gradual accumulation of detail that eventually tips into revelation. If you have always wanted the Thursday Murder Club puzzles to be a little harder, a little more grounded, this is the direction to travel.
The Right Recommendation
Readers who come to The Long Game from Osman will find a novel that respects their intelligence and rewards their patience. The same core pleasures are present — the puzzle, the community, the satisfaction of a well-constructed mystery — but the tone is more sober, the history is heavier, and the resolution carries a weight that Osman, by design, never attempts.
Think of it as the natural next step for a Thursday Murder Club reader who is ready to go somewhere darker.
[Get The Long Game on Amazon → kerrycostellobooks.com]
— Kerry Costello is the author of The Long Game and the Frankie Armstrong series. Find out more at kerrycostellobooks.com.