Flautopiccolo

Last night I finished The Last Devil to Die, the fourth book in the Thursday Murder Club Mysteries by Richard Osman. As usual, it was on hold at Minuteman for several months. And also as usual, it was another fun, twisty book.

I will miss Stephen. We learn about Ibrahim and Marius.

Highlights:

• Turkey and stuffing, balloons and streamers, crackers and hats. A nice bottle of red, and what Elizabeth assumes are Christmas pop songs playing in the background. Friendship, and Joyce flirting unsuccessfully with a Welshman who appears to be the subject of a fairly serious international fraud. Elizabeth could think of worse ways to spend the holidays.
• Joanna’s present for Joyce: a flask they use in space, engraved with Merry Christmas, Mum! Here’s to no murders next year
• Donna: Can I help you, ladies? We’re from the police, we investigate crime for a living, how lovely to meet you.
• Stephen wrote himself a letter about his dementia, to be delivered in one year.
• Ibrahim: Hard copies are very wasteful. I would like, if possible, the Thursday Murder Club to become carbon neutral by 2030.
• Donna and Bogdan are at the football match where Dom Holt will be, not an art exhibition. And Chris and Patrice are at a winery across the street from Dom Holt’s office, not at the garden center.
• Patrice to Chris: I’m going to be an actual lookout? Finally a proper date.
• Sunday lunch at the restaurant at Coopers Chase: But it has never seen the sort of gathering currently sitting around the private table in the conservatory. Two of Britain’s most prolific drug smugglers, a multimillionaire antiques dealer and her enormous Canadian husband, a professor of historical archaeology at Kent University, a heavily tattooed Polish builder and, at the head of the table, the proud hosts, a former nurse, a former spy, a former trades union official and an occasionally still-practicing psychiatrist.
• I loved the abrupt changes in the lunch conversation:
  Elizabeth: Luca, you have also lost out financially though, again, you would be a suspect both in the disappearance of the heroin and in the death by gunshot of—
  Joyce, as three young waitresses bring in their starters: And a bouncy castle for the children. They’re very reasonable to hire. We could charge fifty pence a turn.
  Samantha Barnes: Two pounds a turn.
  Mitch Maxwell: One fifty. Come on. Two quid?
  Garth, nodding his thanks to the waitress: Don’t talk to my wife like that.
  Ibrahim: The absolute key will be no shoes on the bouncy castle. Even with insurance we must—
• Elizabeth: However noble the causes of her career were, they weren’t noble enough to excuse the disregard for life. Day after day, mission after mission, ridding the world of evil? Waiting for the last devil to die? What a joke. New devils will always spring up, like daffodils in springtime.