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Richard Osman’s THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB, the first in The Thursday Murder Club series, centers around four elderly residents of a fashionable retirement center who meet on Thursdays to solve unsolved murders.

A founding member, Penny Gray, who was a retired police inspector, brought files on unsolved murders for the foursome to study. Poor Penny is now in a coma. Her replacement in the group, Joyce (who shares her diary entries with readers) was a nurse. The unofficial leader of the group is Elizabeth, who has a knack of acquiring information by calling in favors people owe her. Ibraham and Ron are the two men in the group.

After an actual murder occurs, the group jumps in to solve it. The police are involved, too, of course (I like Donna De Freitas), and they do an admirable job; but as you probably can guess, they are no match for (drum roll) THE THURSDAY MURDER CLUB.

Being an acute observer of human behavior myself, I easily fingered the murderer even before the actual murder. To my chagrin, the obvious murderer instead became the first victim. (In the story we learn of three or four murders and two suicides, some fifty years apart.)

Reviewers call the book “clever� and “laugh out loud funny.� I personally enjoy clever, but don’t like silly (Monty Python excepted). I found some parts clever, but too many silly in the first half of the book. The only time I laughed out loud was when I said to myself, “You paid good money for this?� To be fair, I have long heard the English idea of laughing out loud is to say “Jolly good show.�

But wait � That sounds too critical. Here’s the deal: Early on there are many parallel storylines. The chapters are very short and they hop around the various storylines. I could not latch onto any characters or care about all the plots for the first 200 pages. I definitely didn’t laugh out loud (though I did say Good Show a few times).

Many of the side stories came into focus around page 200, and I understood the characters better. About that time, the plot thickened, as mystery writers like to say, and before I knew it, I was enjoying the book. The Oddest thing: As I read the final 150 pages, I’d recall snippets from the first 200 pages and suddenly they seemed more relevant than when I initially read them. I even thought of reading the first 200 pages again to see if they made more sense now that I knew the whole story (but then the Super Bowl started).

The author, Richard Osman, is better known in England for creating, writing and sometimes appearing in TV shows. In the U.S., you might be familiar with two of his shows - Suvivor and Deal or No Deal. (Neither of which, I regret, I’ve ever seen.)

My rating: 4 stars. It might be 5 stars except for the offputting first 200 pages.