We Chase Shadows

A body turns up in the Italian hills, the light is golden, the espresso is excellent, and someone with money would very much prefer the local carabinieri stay out of it. That last part is the whole game. When a client hires you to find a killer on the strict condition that the killer never sees a courtroom, you are not solving a crime so much as agreeing to keep a secret.

What it's about

This is the second outing for Steve Wheeler and his daughter-in-law Amy, the reluctant investigating duo Richard Osman introduced in We Solve Murders. Steve is retired, cautious, happiest with his cat and his quiz nights. Amy is a private security operative whose job tends to involve very rich people and very sudden danger. Here a killing in the Tuscan hills brings a client with an unusual request: find who did it, but keep the police out entirely.

Osman writes ensemble crime, so expect the case to pull in a cast of the glamorous, the shady, and the quietly lethal, scattered across nicer postcodes than most of us will ever visit. Beyond the premise above, the pleasure is all in the shape of it: warmth, banter, a plot that takes its time, and menace that arrives politely before it arrives properly. Fans of the first book will recognize the rhythm the moment they open this one.

Why everyone's talking about it

Two reasons. First, Osman has become the rare author whose release date functions as a small national event in the UK, and The Thursday Murder Club film adaptation put his particular brand of cozy-with-teeth in front of a much larger crowd. Second, this series is the one where he swaps the retirement village for a younger, jet-lagged, globe-trotting pair, which reads faster and travels further.

Who it hits for: readers who go to crime fiction for company as much as for the case, who like a mystery that lets characters breathe between the bodies. Who should wait: anyone who wants a tight, clue-forward puzzle they can race. Osman prioritizes people over deduction, and the coziness is a feature, not an accident. If a leisurely middle chapter annoys you, this will annoy you.

The verdict, for now

The Osman name is one of the safest bets in the genre, and sequels in a working series tend to please the people who liked book one while quietly winning a few new ones. Our read-or-wait take: read it now if you loved We Solve Murders or want a plane book with a passport, and wait for the paperback if the first one left you politely checking your watch. Either way, the cat survives. Probably.