Richard Osman has taken a break from his retired senior citizens of the Thursday Murder Club. His new crew of investigators include Amy Wheeler, a spritely bodyguard with a blond ponytail, who really, really likes punching and shooting people; her father-in-law, Steve Wheeler, a retired cop living in a small town in rural England whose desires in life, now that he is a widow, mostly revolve around petting his cat and going to trivia night at the local pub; and Rosie D’Antonia, an aging crime novelist with so much money that she owns islands and jets, but suffers from insufficient stimulation and cannot wait to get involved in drugs, alcohol, murder, and general mayhem.

The bodyguard company that Amy works for begins to lose clients to mysterious murders and Amy appears to be implicated in several untimely deaths. While Amy is protecting Rosie D’Antonio on a secluded island off South Carolina, things go south, and suddenly the old novelist and the young protector are on the run. They cover a good part of the globe as new attackers hunt them down and they investigate, now with assistance from Amy’s father-in-law, the mysterious deaths of several mid-level instagram influencers.

The book contains a handful of Osman’s signature funny moments, and the question of who is behind all the mayhem is suitably obscure, but the characters are more contrived and less compelling than the old folks at Coopers Chase retirement village.

On the plus side there are very few writers who can match JK Rowling’s (writing under the pseudonym Robert Galbraith) ability to capture personality, dialogue, and character. In this, the sixth in the series of crime novels involving private detectives Robin Ellicott and Cormoran Strike, Rowling takes on the viciousness, malignancy, and unbridled misogyny of internet communities that spiral downward into the Dark Web.

What begins as a quirky YouTube cartoon grows in popularity among an on-line fandom. Only the fandom becomes so opinionated about the direction, and Directors, that the power of the fans overtakes the show itself. The anonymity of the internet allows people to form relationships they might not in real life, but it also permits abusers to mislead, harass, intimidate, and threaten. All of that secrecy and privacy makes for a compelling mystery when one of the directors is murdered. In a cemetery!

On the downside, as happened in the Harry Potter series, Rowling’s editors were unable to push back. The number of potential suspects is so large that it is likely the only way to keep them all straight is to be staring at Rowling’s diagrams pasted across her walls. Likewise, the number of pages has grown to an overwhelming 1,462. The book should have been tighter.