Author Richard Osman has written another cleverly constructed, crowd pleaser of a crime novel for readers of a certain age, says book reviewer ANNA CREER.

Richard Osman’s debut cosy crime novel, The Thursday Murder Club, featuring the investigative talents of four friends in a retirement complex, was the publishing sensation of 2020.

In the week leading up December 19 that year, it sold 134,514 copies, making it the first debut novel ever to be the Christmas number one in the UK. 

The Impossible Fortune (Penquin) sees the return of Elizabeth, Joyce, Ron and Ibrahim, residents of Coopers Chase retirement village. 

Elizabeth’s beloved husband Stephen has died and she’s still grieving. Her friends are concerned, but Joyce’s daughter Joanna is getting married and Elizabeth joins them to celebrate, even though she feels “always alone now. Always alone, and never alone: that was grief”. 

At the reception, best man Nick Silver tells her somebody tried to kill him that morning. There was a bomb under his car and “something jump-starts inside her. For the last year her heartbeat has felt like a machine, a mechanical pump keeping her alive against her will, but now it feels flesh”. 

Silver asks for her help because he doesn’t want to involve the police, gives her the name of three suspects and then disappears. Silver co-owns a “cold-storage” facility, The Compound, which has within it the code for a fortune in Bitcoin. Someone is trying to steal it and will murder on the way. 

The Impossible Fortune is complex, as Osman brings in a variety of extra, younger characters to help in the investigation.

However, the expectations of his readers will not be disappointed. The style is full of wry observations and gentle wit. Above all is the attraction of his four main characters. 

Osman has said: “I didn’t write about them as older characters. I wrote about them as engaged human beings with some of the disadvantages – and advantages that age has brought them. Basically, they can get away with anything.” 

The end result is another cleverly constructed, crowd pleaser of a crime novel for readers of a certain age. 

PIP Fioretti, however, doesn’t write cosy crime, rather setting her historical crime in outback Australia, just before the outbreak of World War I.

She made an impressive debut with Bone Lands (2024), which recently won the 2025 Danger Award for best crime fiction, an award for books using Australia as a setting for stories about crime and justice. 

Bone Lands introduced mounted trooper Augustus (Gus) Hawkins, a traumatised veteran of the Boer War. Now he returns in Skull River (Affirm Press) set in 1912. 

Gus has been posted to the failing gold town of Colley in the central west of NSW. He arrives from Bathurst after midnight, only to be woken early the next morning by his junior officer, Trooper Scanlon, with a report of trouble at Gibbet Hill, a five-hour ride away. But on the way they are ambushed. Scanlon is killed but Gus escapes and returns to town to discover the police station is on fire and that no emergency message had been received from Gibbet Hill. 

However, for Gus the whole experience energises him. 

“All I could think of was the moment my horse went down and the bullets flying over me and how it felt so right and perfect. I knew what to do, met the chaos like an old friend, the familiar smell of gunpowder and blood. And a feeling so familiar, yet so long past, of being alive”.

Bathurst sends four troopers and a detective. The troopers are “typical young blokes: all muscle and high spirits, eat their own body weight in mutton pies and sleep the sleep of a puppy at day’s end”, while Superintendent MacKerras is “tall and grim and had the air of a man who’d been raised in a Scottish bothy”. 

The tension in the town escalates when Scanlon’s horse returns to town with the trooper’s mutilated body. Gus vows vengeance. But Colley is a tough town. The prospectors have come and gone, “leaving a ravaged landscape and a dying river… there was no local prosperity or even any level of security… only the blackberries and the wild pigs are doing well”. Life is hard in Colley and its people keep their secrets close.

Fioreti’s great talent is bringing back to vivid life a neglected time in Australia’s history and populating it with memorable characters. Often bleak and shocking, Skull River is compulsive reading.