Michelle Blanchard Ardillo

In Death on the Marlow Belle (Poisoned Pen Press, September, 2025) this fourth installment of The Marlow Murder Club, a cozy murder mystery series, author Robert Thorogood has returned us to Marlow, a very real town located on the Thames River thirty miles from London.

This is brilliant news for all of Thorogood’s fans, as was the news that the novels were being adapted for television. Here in America, it can be seen on PBS Masterpiece Theatre.

The tv series is excellent, an ensemble cast led brilliantly by Samantha Bond, who you might recognize as (if you are of a certain age) Miss Moneypenny in four James Bond films or as Lady Rosamund, Lord Grantham’s wealthy widowed sister in Downton Abbey. While she doesn’t necessarily match the physical description Thorogood creates in the books, she embodies the character of Judith Potts full stop. For me, watching the first series of this show made me love the books even more. Now while reading each new book in the series I am picturing the locale and the characters based on the tv shows, which is not always a good thing for me, but in this case, it totally is.

Thorogood is not new to the world of writing murder mysteries adapted for television, as he created the popular Death in Paradise, another long running hit series.

There are some reviews that say that the Marlow Murder Club series is a knock-off of the Thursday Murder Club mega-blockbuster series. I see that, and I did think that at first. However, where the Thursday Murder Club series by Richard Osman is clever and witty, the Marlow Murder Club is (to me) more in the style of the classic murder mystery novels that heavily appear in my Goodreads “read” category. The Osman characters share an important similarity: senior citizens living together in a retirement village. The Thorogood characters are all individual and at different stages in their lives. They each have good things in their lives and they each have things that are weighing them down. One thing in common in both series however is that each character brings to the crime-solving table a talent or skill much needed in solving the crimes.

Death on the Marlow Belle, with another brilliant cover, is very good. Almost to the very end. The plot revolves around a local community theatre group, something near and dear to my heart. I was heavily involved in Columbia Theatre Players, a community theatre group in Hammond, Louisiana, from 1983 to 1988. I served in many positions on the board, was on the play selection committee for each new season, and was either onstage or backstage in over forty productions over the course of those five years, also directing two plays, one a murder mystery, the mother ship if you will of murder mysteries, Ten Little Indians based upon Agatha Christie’s beloved and chilling novel And Then There Were None.

I absolutely was all in when I realized the characters of this fourth installment were almost all involved in a production of The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde, another one of my all time favorite plays, albeit a comedy of manners, not a murder mystery. (Still hoping that I get to play Lady Bracknell one day onstage, it would be the dream role of a lifetime for me!) The actual murder in Death on the Marlow Belle actually takes place on a boat on the Thames, and I do love myself a boat ride!

So why do I say it was very good almost to the end? Well, I felt the denouement was a little forced. I can’t imagine anything in real life going down that way. I know it’s fiction, and the writer can write whatever he or she chooses, but living and breathing theatre the way I did for a long time, I just can’t really see it happening like that.

The other small nagging point for me is the last fifty words of this book. Huge, huge, cliffhanger pointing directly (and not in a subtle ooooohhhhh way) to book #5. I felt that was a bit heavy-handed.

But all in all, I really liked Death on the Marlow Belle. I look forward to the next season of The Marlow Murder Club being released in America so I can enjoy this cast of characters on both the written page and on the small screen!

Thank you to NetGalley and Poisoned Pen Press for the ARC!