We Solve Murders - [8.5/10]

This might be the ‘newest’ book I’ve read, as it was published in 2024 and I read it in 2025. Really enjoyed the style and pacing of the book, the author Richard Osman has a really unique style of writing dialogue, the way people communicated was very abrupt, direct, sarcastic. Very dry and enjoyable humour. It does a really good job of having a lot of characters and moving in lots of different directions, but I wasn’t lost whilst reading and maintained clarity on who everyone was. That’s a trap a lot of whodunnits fall into, where too many forgettable characters are introduced, and you forget who Tom, Bill and Sarah are. This book successfully avoids this. All of its moving parts combined effortlessly and impressively at the end. This is a feel-good read, but a really cool ‘thriller’ story, pretty funny also. I enjoyed it a lot overall, also changed settings a lot which I appreciate quite a bit in a book. One thing that flags my concern, is where in the story a character uses Chatgpt to alter their messages so they can’t be recognised. While I don’t think this author used Chatgpt, it does raise my concerns of authors/artists in the future generating content, because it’s so easy and accessible, and so hard to detect or call out as a consumer. It then also raises the question of does it matter? Will we get to a point where AI content is consumed with no thought otherwise? I would feel disappointed if I read something I enjoyed and found out it was ai, would this feeling if disappointment be eradicated in future years? Like ‘why are you disappointed, its accepted and normal to use AI to write books’. There’s no way around it (hand write books? Live book writing sessions?) and I really hope that books avoid this eradication of creativity by AI. At least there are plenty of books before AI that I can read and fully know that it is human thought, but just sucks that in the back of my head I can’t fully trust any modern forms of art.

Book was fire though.

Author: Richard Osman