Murder by Cheesecake

Murder by Cheesecake builds on trends in in cozy mysteries, the wider mystery genre, and even some thrillers, which increasingly feature older women as seemingly unlikely sleuths. This expands the genre’s reach into questions of gender, identity in older age, and family relationships. Though older women as sleuths are not new—Agatha Christie’s Golden Age Sleuth, Miss Marple, appeared in 1930s Murder at the Vicarage—these more recent offerings take on modern social questions and often include characters who are not British gentry or aristocrats.

Richard Osman’s Thursday Murder Club series pays homage to the Golden Age of Detection but uses the whodunnit to explore questions of morality and mortality. The plots take place in the retirement community of Coopers Chase in Kent. The four sleuths come from radically different backgrounds—Joyce is a middle-class nurse, while Ibrahim Arif grew up in Egypt and worked as a psychiatrist. Ron Ritchie is a proudly working-class firebrand, while the mysterious Elizabeth has more elite roots and worked as a spy. Like the characters in Murder by Cheesecake, several of the four friends are widowed or have lost partners, so their grief and search for meaning fuel the plot.