“Thursday, December 27th, eleven p.m. Kuldesh Sharma hopes he’s in the right place. He parks up at the end of the dirt track, hemmed in on all sides by trees, ghoulish in the darkness. He had finally made up his mind at about four this afternoon, sitting in the back room of his shop. The box was sitting on the table in front of him. He made two phone calls, and now here he is. He switches off his headlights and sits in total darkness. It’s a hell of a risk, that’s for sure. But he’s nearly eighty years old, so when better to take that risk? What’s the worst that can happen? They find him and kill him?”
Those are some opening lines to Richard Osman’s fourth Thursday Murder Club Mystery, The Last Devil to Die. Kuldesh owns an antiques shop. On Wednesday, he purchased a beat-up box from a mystery man who said someone would be in the next day to offer him a lot more than he paid for it. Kuldesh was aware that many drug dealers used this ploy to bring drugs into the country and even with the threat of danger, he decides to hide the box.
Kuldesh is the first murder to take place and because he was a friend of the Thursday Murder Club, they decide to not only find the box with the cocaine but solve the murder. Several other drug dealers enter the story and other people die during the course of the story including one of Cooper’s Chase’s residents. There’s also a side story of one of the residents needing to be saved from an online dating hoax.
If you’ve enjoyed any of the other Thursday Murder Club mysteries, then you must read The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman.
