Catherine Raynes: We Solve Murders and Here One Moment

We Solve Murders by Richard Osman  

Steve Wheeler is enjoying retired life. He does the odd bit of investigation work, but he prefers his familiar habits and routines: the pub quiz, his favourite bench, his cat waiting for him when he comes home. His days of adventure are over: adrenaline is daughter-in-law Amy’s business now. 

Amy Wheeler thinks adrenaline is good for the soul. As a private security officer, she doesn’t stay still long enough for habits or routines. She’s currently on a remote island keeping world-famous author Rosie D’Antonio alive. Which was meant to be an easy job . . . 

Then a dead body, a bag of money and a killer with their sights on Amy have her sending an SOS to the only person she trusts. A breakneck race around the world begins, but can Amy and Steve stay one step ahead of a deadly enemy? 

Here One Moment by Liane Moriarty  

Aside from a delay, there will be no problems. The flight will be smooth, it will land safely. Everyone who gets on the plane will get off. But almost all of them will be forever changed. 
 
Because on this ordinary, short, domestic flight, something extraordinary happens. People learn how and when they are going to die. For some, their death is far in the future—age 103!—and they laugh. But for six passengers, their predicted deaths are not far away at all. 
 
How do they know this? There were ostensibly more interesting people on the flight (the bride and groom, the jittery, possibly famous woman, the giant Hemsworth-esque guy who looks like an off-duty superhero, the frazzled, gorgeous flight attendant) but none would become as famous as “The Death Lady.” 
 
Not a single passenger or crew member will later recall noticing her board the plane. She wasn’t exceptionally old or young, rude or polite. She wasn’t drunk or nervous or pregnant. Her appearance and demeanor were unremarkable. But what she did on that flight was truly remarkable. 
 
A few months later, one passenger dies exactly as she predicted. Then two more passengers die, again, as she said they would. Soon no one is thinking this is simply an entertaining story at a cocktail party. 
 
If you were told you only had a certain amount of time left to live, would you do things differently? Would you try to dodge your destiny? 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:07):
You're listening to the Saturday Morning with Jack Team podcast
from News Talks.

Speaker 2 (00:11):
AB Time to Capture with our book reviewer Katherine rains Gelder.
Morning Jack, you got two fantastic reads for us this morning,
two great books to recommend. Let's start off with the
latest from Richard Osmond tell us about We Solve Murders.

Speaker 3 (00:25):
So this is a new detective series from him. So
he's the author of The Thursday Murder Club, which is
gaining real traction as a great series. And in this series,
though you had met Steve Wheeler. He's a retired cop,
does a bit of local investigation. He's very good at
pub quizzz. He's a bit of a puzzle expert, loves
a good point. He's still grieving the fact that his
wife Devi died a couple of years ago, and he

(00:47):
has this great bond with his daughter in law, a
woman called Amy. And Amy's quite an unusual character. She
works in private security and she's a very experienced bodyguard
and she protects highly important people. And she's very calm
and very calculating, and she's very good at keeping her
emotions at bay. And she's currently working on a private
island off the coast of South Carolina and she's guarding

(01:08):
an author author, a woman called Rosie, and then a
dead body washes up with a bag of money. It's
found on the yacht and Amy starts to get involved
in this, and she calls her father in law, Steve,
for help, and they end up on this trip around
the world. Rosie's trying to help out as well. They're
trying to solve some murders. So they're in South Carolina
and England, Saint Lachera in Ireland, and Shubai and all

(01:30):
sorts of things are going on. There's social media influences,
there's money laundering. Amy looks like she's about to be
framed for murder and there's a target on her back.
But it is a really delightful read. The characters lovable,
even the kind of obnoxious ones. That's not overly complicated,
and there're one or two twists, but it's just one
of those very well written cozy murder type books, and

(01:52):
Richard Osmond does it superbly well.

Speaker 2 (01:55):
Nice. Okay, next up a book I know will have
had a lot of hype and we'll have many of
our listeners extremely excited. The latest from Leanne Mariarty. She
have big little lives fame tell us about here one moment.

Speaker 3 (02:08):
So in this she looks at free will and destiny
and grief and that struggle to maintain certainly and control
in a very uncertain world. And it's a very unusual mystery.
It's got the mystical, the dramatic, and lots of philosophical
elements in it. And it starts with this woman who
you don't really know her age, and she doesn't stand

(02:29):
out from the crowd. And all of a sudden there's
this delayed flight from Sydney to Hobart and she stands
up and she counts to three and she begins to
predict the dying age and cause of death for each passenger,
which is completely unnerving for the passengers. And she tells
this beautiful Indian flight attendant allegre that she will die

(02:50):
at the age of twenty eight from south harm And
she tells another woman that her child will learn live
to one hundred, and another lady that her little boy
will die from the age of seven. And this middle
aged couple, Sue and Max, are shocked because Max is
going to live into his nineties. And Sue is told
that she'll die from pink creatic cancer despite being a

(03:11):
nurse who looks after herself. And so then you try
to work out who this very unusual woman is, and
she's called Cherry, and people are wondering what if she
accurately predicted the exact dates and causes of people's death.
And then three people die as she predicted, and the
remaining passengers on the plane become increasingly nervous. You know,

(03:32):
should Leo kind of quit his job and should allegracy
psychological help and should pull to teach her son to
swim because she'd predicted that he was going to die drowning.
And you also get Sherry's story, and she's quirky and
this connection with her dad and her psychic mother, and
she's very eccentric in this situation that led her to

(03:53):
them calling her the death Lady as she makes these predictions.
And it's a very thought provoking novel and different choices
in parts that our lives take and those interactions about
the things that we can control and the things that
we can't. But yeah, it's quite a shock. She rolls
onto the Paine and she starts talking about their lives.

Speaker 2 (04:10):
Yeah, Oh, superb Okay, that sounds great. So that's from
Leanne Moriarty. It's called Here One Moment. And that first
book is by Richard Osman. It's called We Solve Murders.
Thank you, Catherine, Thank you Jack.

Speaker 1 (04:22):
For more from Saturday Morning with Jack Tame, listen live
to News Talks d B from nine am Saturday, or
follow the podcast on iHeartRadio