The Last Devil to Die — The Thursday Murder Club, Book 4

The Last Devil to Die Review

By the fourth book in a cosy mystery series, a certain comfortable predictability is usually the point — readers return for the characters and the reassurance of a formula they enjoy. Richard Osman delivers both, but The Last Devil to Die also does something the earlier books held back from: it takes the emotional reality of ageing seriously.

The case involves a murdered antiques dealer, missing heroin, and a drug gang operating through legitimate businesses — all standard cosy mystery territory. What elevates it is the personal connection: one of the Thursday Murder Club’s core members has a relationship with the dead man that makes this investigation something other than a pleasant intellectual puzzle.

A Murder Close to Home

The dead man is Kuldesh Sharma, an antiques dealer and an old friend of the Coopers Chase set, found shot after a consignment of heroin goes missing on a single night’s storage. The drug plot itself — county-lines dealers, a shipment that turns out to be hiding something far more valuable than narcotics, a contract killer or two — is competent but familiar Osman machinery. The difference this time is proximity: the victim is not a stranger but one of the gang’s own circle, which means the four amateur sleuths are not solving a puzzle so much as avenging a friend. That shift, from intellectual diversion to personal reckoning, gives the fourth book a propulsive urgency the earlier instalments deliberately kept at arm’s length.

Stephen’s Long Goodbye

The novel’s true subject, though, is not the murder at all. It is Stephen — Elizabeth’s husband, the gentle former intelligence man whose dementia has been worsening across the series and here reaches its devastating final stage. Osman handles his decline, and its toll on Elizabeth, with a tenderness and honesty that lifts the book clean out of the cosy genre. Without spoiling its course, this thread asks the hardest questions a comfort read can ask — about dignity, love, and what we owe the people we are losing while they are still here — and it earns the tears it draws. It is the most emotionally serious writing Osman has done, and it is what readers remember long after the heroin and the killers fade.

Cosy With Real Weight

What makes the balance work is that Osman never lets the grief smother the warmth. Joyce’s diary entries remain among the funniest narration in contemporary crime fiction; Ron, Ibrahim, and Elizabeth are as sharp and as fond of one another as ever; and the running joke of the series — that nobody expects people this old to be this dangerous — still delivers. But the laughter now sits beside genuine mortality rather than holding it at bay. The retired spies and doctors and trade unionists of Coopers Chase have always lived in death’s neighbourhood; here, for the first time, Osman lets that fact land with full force. The result is a book that is both his funniest and his saddest.

The Ensemble Around the Edges

Part of what makes the Thursday Murder Club books so beloved is that the central quartet is never alone, and the fourth instalment keeps its wide supporting cast busy. Bogdan, the unflappable Polish handyman, deepens into one of the series’ most quietly moving figures through his devotion to Stephen and his chess games with him. The local police duo, PC Donna De Freitas and DCI Chris Hudson, continue their gentle, food-loving subplots; Ron and Ibrahim get their own running gags and small dignities; and Joyce — ever underestimated, ever observing — remains the warm heart through whose diary much of the story reaches us. Osman juggles these threads with the assurance of a writer who knows his world intimately, and the texture of a genuine community is what gives the central tragedy its resonance. We grieve with these people because we have come to know them across four books.

Why the Series Endures

Richard Osman, a familiar face on British television before he turned novelist, built this series on a deceptively radical premise: that people in their seventies and eighties are not finished, not peripheral, not waiting quietly to die, but funny, clever, capable, and dangerous. The Last Devil to Die is the book where that premise pays its deepest dividend, because it dares to look directly at the thing the cosy genre usually keeps offstage — mortality itself — and finds there not despair but love. The mystery is solid, the comedy reliable, but it is this willingness to take ageing seriously, to treat the end of a long life as worthy of real feeling, that has made these books a phenomenon rather than merely a success. It is a comfort read with a genuine soul. By the final page, the title’s meaning has quietly shifted from the criminal plot to something far more personal, and the four friends who began the series as a charming gimmick have become people whose joys and losses readers feel as their own — which is the rarest achievement a long-running series can manage.

Verdict: The best entry in the series since the first. Long-term fans will find it deeply moving; new readers should start with The Thursday Murder Club and work forward to feel the full weight of what this book does.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — The most emotionally resonant Thursday Murder Club novel yet: Osman deepens his portrait of ageing and grief without losing the cosy wit that made the series a phenomenon.

Thursday Murder Club Reading Order

1. The Thursday Murder Club
2. The Man Who Died Twice
3. The Bullet That Missed
4. The Last Devil to Die ← you are here

Reading Guides

• Richard Osman Books in Order: The Thursday Murder Club Series Guide (2026)