The Impossible Fortune by Richard Osman: A Review

Richard Osman's comfort-food formula is by now a known quantity: gentle, funny, deeply competent characters solving a mystery that's more puzzle-box than grim, with the violence kept mostly offstage and the jokes kept mostly onstage. "The Impossible Fortune" is his latest entry in the world he built outside the Thursday Murder Club, and it delivers exactly the tone his readers show up for, with a plot that leans harder into globe-trotting caper territory than his earlier books.

The Impossible Fortune

Richard Osman

Osman's warm, funny, puzzle-driven mystery formula applied to a bigger, more globe-trotting caper than his previous books. Cozy in tone, clever in construction.

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Osman's Strength Is Still Character, Not Just Plot

What keeps Osman's books re-readable, according to every panelist who's read more than one of his novels, isn't the mystery mechanics — it's that his characters are actually pleasant to spend time with, which is rarer in the genre than it should be. The dialogue carries most of this book's momentum; even panelists who guessed the central twist well ahead of the reveal said they didn't mind, because the getting-there was the point. If you want a thriller built entirely around not seeing the ending coming, this isn't engineered primarily for that.

The larger, more international scope in this entry was the panel's biggest point of disagreement. Two readers felt it gave the book more energy and higher stakes than his more contained earlier mysteries. One panelist, a long-time fan of the tighter small-town scale of the Thursday Murder Club books, missed the intimacy of a smaller cast and a single confined setting.

Do You Need to Read the Earlier Books First?

No — this stands on its own, and Osman does a light-touch job of reintroducing the returning characters without slowing things down for new readers. That said, panelists who'd read his previous entry in this particular series got noticeably more out of a few character beats and callbacks that a first-time reader will simply take at face value.

The Humor-to-Tension Balance, Specifically

Osman's defining skill, more than plotting, is calibrating exactly how much genuine danger a scene needs before the humor undercuts it versus before the tension gets grim enough to feel out of step with the book's overall tone. This entry pushes that balance further toward danger than his gentlest work, without ever tipping into the kind of violence that would feel jarring against the character comedy. One panelist, new to Osman entirely, said the book made her laugh out loud twice in the first fifty pages and then genuinely worried for a character's safety by page two hundred — which is close to the exact reaction the formula is engineered to produce.

The larger, more globe-trotting plot also gives Osman more room for the kind of logistics-based comedy that's become a signature of his — competent people executing an absurd plan with total professional seriousness. If you've enjoyed that specific flavor of humor in his previous books, this entry leans into it more than his earlier, smaller-scale mysteries had space for.

Audiobook Note

Osman's books are frequently praised in audio format, and this one is no exception — the ensemble cast and dialogue-heavy style suit a strong narrator especially well. If you're choosing a format, audio is a legitimate first choice here, not just a fallback for a slower reader.

Why Osman's Formula Keeps Working

It's worth asking, three-plus books into a recognizable formula, why Osman's mysteries haven't started to feel repetitive the way a lot of long-running cozy-mystery series eventually do. Our panel's theory, after comparing this entry against his earlier work: he varies the mechanics of the mystery itself — the type of crime, the shape of the reveal, the specific way the ensemble's skills get deployed to solve it — even while keeping the tone and character chemistry consistent. Readers come back for the reliable warmth and humor, but the puzzle underneath it hasn't been recycled book to book, which is a harder discipline to maintain than it might look from outside the genre.

"The Impossible Fortune" continues that pattern rather than breaking it, which is exactly what a reader picking this up because they liked his previous work should want. It's not a reinvention, and it isn't trying to be one — it's a confident, well-constructed entry in a formula that Osman has clearly thought carefully about not wearing out.

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See where this lands against the rest of the year's crime fiction in our Best Thriller and Crime Novels of 2026 roundup, alongside our review of Holly Jackson's "Not Quite Dead Yet."

The Supporting Ensemble

Part of what makes an Osman book rewarding on a second read is how much is happening in the margins of scenes that seem, on a first pass, to be mostly about advancing plot. A minor character's offhand comment in chapter four routinely turns out to matter in chapter twenty, and the ensemble's internal dynamics — old friendships, old grudges, unspoken affection between characters who'd never say so directly — get developed almost entirely through what they do for each other rather than through direct exposition. "The Impossible Fortune" continues that tradition, and panelists who caught the foreshadowing on a first read reported more satisfaction with the ending than those who read purely for plot momentum and missed it.

Who Should Skip This One

To be fair to readers this book isn't for: if you find Osman's brand of gentleness saccharine rather than comforting, or if you specifically want your mysteries to carry real, sustained menace rather than menace-with-a-safety-net, this won't convert you. The comedy is load-bearing throughout, and it's not trying to hide that. Our one skeptical panelist — a reader who generally prefers grittier crime fiction — enjoyed individual scenes but said the book never once made her genuinely afraid for a character, which for her genre preference was a real shortfall rather than a stylistic choice she could set aside.

If that describes your taste too, this is a case where recognizing a mismatch in expectations up front will serve you better than reading against your own preferences and blaming the book for not being something it never intended to be. Osman is exceptionally good at what he's doing here; what he's doing simply isn't for every crime-fiction reader, and that's a fair trade-off for how well-loved his books are among the readers they are for.

Availability and Format

Available in hardcover, paperback, e-book, and audiobook. As noted above, audio is a genuinely strong choice for this one given the dialogue-heavy, ensemble-cast style — more so than for most books on our thriller list this year.

Bottom Line

"The Impossible Fortune" doesn't reinvent what Osman does well, and after several entries in this general style, it isn't trying to. What it delivers is a confident, well-paced, genuinely funny mystery with a bigger canvas than his earlier books, populated by characters worth spending another few hundred pages with. For the specific reader this formula is built for, that's exactly what a new Osman release should deliver, and this one does.

If you're new to Osman entirely and picking your very first book of his based on this review, our panel's advice is to go in with the right expectations: this is comfort reading with real craft behind it, not a white-knuckle thriller. Once you know that's what you're signing up for, it's very hard not to enjoy the ride.

For existing fans specifically: this delivers on the promise of the series while pushing its scope a little further than before, and it's a worthy addition to a shelf that's already earned its reputation for reliable, character-driven comfort reading worth returning to book after book.