Meet the Gen Z superfans of Thursday Murder Club

Think the bestselling mystery books – now adapted for Netflix — are exclusively for readers as old as their crime- busting OAP heroes? Think again. Helen Coffey speaks to the twentysomething BookTokkers who can’t get enough

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There's an army of us on TikTok.

” Rhianah Parkes, 23, is talking about fans of The Thursday Murder Club. More specifically, young fans of The Thursday Murder Club. The learning and development operative from Leicestershire, who posts book review videos from the account @rhislibraryx, read the first in Richard Osman’s popular cosy crime series back in January 2024. “I binged the first three, then I read the fourth one when it came out,” she says. “And I literally just read the newest one last week.”

Since the first book was published in 2020, swiftly followed by The Man Who Died Twice (2021), The Bullet That Missed (2022), and The Last Devil to Die (2023), Osman’s series has gone from being a British success story to a global phenomenon. The Thursday Murder Club became the No 1 bestselling Christmas title in the UK, a first for a debut novelist; the most recent in the current quartet ended up No 1 on the New York Times Best Seller list in October 2023. The fifth instalment, The Impossible Fortune, is due to drop on 25 September (thanks to her BookTok credentials, Parkes has been lucky enough to receive an advance copy). And this week sees the release of a Netflix film adapted from the first in the series, with Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Celia Imrie and Ben Kingsley among the cast.