'The Thursday Murder Club' by Richard Osman review

This book has had SO much hype around it on social media that I was super excited to read it. I love Richard Osman as a TV personality, and the idea of a book where OAPs solve crimes a la Midsomer murders together just sounded so cute and fun. I did end up being quite disappointed in the book in the end, but I'm not sure if I would have been had the reviews I'd read not all been absolutely glowing and intense.
The Thursday Murder Club is set in a quiet retirement village in Oxford, England. Four OAPs - Elizabeth, Joyce, Ibrahim and Ron - band together to form a murder club, where they discuss old cases and become excited when a local planning developer is found dead in their town. The four of them set out to find the killer by working both with, and in spite of, the police. This takes them on an international, intergenerational adventure where each of them has an important role to play in stopping a killer.
On the surface, this book was everything it promised to be, and I can totally understand why people love it. I thought the ending was good - believable, but not predictable (which is exactly what I want in a book of this kind). However, my main issue was that as soon as I read the Acknowledgements that Richard Osman had written in his own voice I finally clicked with the issue I had throughout that I couldn't quite put my finger on: all of the characters had the same voice, and it was all in Osman's own style. I struggled to distinguish between which of them were talking at times, and although they certainly all had their own characteristics, I feel like this let the side down for what really was a very character-driven novel.
I gave this 3 stars and would recommend if you're a fan of slow-paced crime books. There were definitely parts of this that dragged for me, and I think because of it the book might be better as a slow winter read, rather than a summer one.
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