I usually don't like to nitpick a book, but sometimes I have feelings. There was just a few topics in the Thursday Murder Club that felt wholly unintended by the author that I can't help but side-eye.

This first one is not surprising as (like a lot of mysteries) this book has a good bit of copoganda; the author writes Donna and Chris as sympathetic police characters that the cast and reader are intended to like. (They're mildly competent detectives, although the murder club does all the work.) However, there's some horrific one-off anecdotes that don't feel like the author is intending to be horrifying. A minor one is that Donna abuses her cop powers: she internet stalks her ex and runs his new boyfriends through the computer, she also gets a harasser breathalyzed after punching him. But majorly, she also arrested a shoplifter once and hit him in the knees with a baton because "sometimes you have to hit people". If these characters weren't sympathetic or this anecdote wasn't just dropped with nothing else ever said about it, maybe this would have read differently.

There's also a lot of suicide in this book. So many suicides. Maybe this is a normal topic for a retirement community (question mark?), but I was caught off guard.

Finally, one of the cops (Chris) appears to have an eating disorder (my words). His major character trait is that he's super focused on his weight at all times, believing it's what's holding him back from life in all aspects. But what's worse is that the other cop Donna literally polices his eating (unasked) as a way to "help" him. Maybe my life is pretty blissfully free of food moralizing and food policing and so this was a lot for me to read. It'd also be one thing if this was a story about Chris internalizing messages and having poor self-esteem, but honestly everybody else in the book seems to also reinforce those messages.