The Thursday Murder Club

Elizabeth is the secondary protagonist, with several chapters focused around her life, but she is kept in the third-person perspective. While Elizabeth appears to find out the most about the case, her backstory is never truly revealed. She has been married a few times, and her current husband Stephan is her third. She is the leader, if The Thursday Murder Club were to assign an official one, as the characters always go to her when problems or leads about the case come up. Elizabeth and her friend, Penny Gray, first created The Thursday Murder Club. When Penny became too ill to continue with the group and moved into Willows, the hospital on site, Elizabeth continued the group with the others.

Elizabeth is able to get things done through her many connections. She feels comfortable dealing in favors when it comes to getting what she wants. Her appearance is not described in vivid detail, but there are moments when it is obvious that her age has never hindered her when it comes to being active. She climbs fences at the cemetery and keeps her mind sharp by testing her own memory. Elizabeth is the one who comes up with the plans and assigns the tasks to help move their investigation of the case along. Although her character arc is not one of growth, it is one of revelation. By the time the story closes, Elizabeth has had her impression of people she loved changed; discovering secrets that Penny and John had kept from her was a lot for her to accept. 

Donna De Freitas is a female officer struggling to compete against the gender stereotypes within her police force. She works very hard and has a need to prove herself. Donna previously worked in a bigger city with a high crime rate that kept her job interesting; however, she quit and took the first job transfer she could to get away from her ex-boyfriend. She is assigned to work with Chris Hudson, on his team investigating Tony’s murder, after he is tricked into it by Ibrahim and Ron acting on Elizabeth’s orders.

Ron Ritchie is a strong-willed man who is still in great shape for his age. In his first appearance in the story, he argues at a meeting over the scheduled destruction of the church’s cemetery, The Eternal Garden of Rest. He is one of the four members of The Thursday Murder Club, and he has a son named Jason.

Ibrahim is the fourth and final member of The Thursday Murder Club. He is described as active and relatively healthy. He was a psychologist in his younger days, and clients still sometimes drive out to see him at Coopers Chase. He was the third member of The Thursday Murder Club to join after Elizabeth and Penny created it, given his past expertise in psychology, and was closely followed by Ron.

Ian is the majority owner of Coopers Chase and one of the main antagonists of the story. He fires his business partner Tony in the first few opening chapters, a man who later ends up dead, and has plans to demolish the church’s cemetery. Ian is very driven by money and believes that he can buy what he wants. After there is a scuffle between Father Matthew and himself, Ian drops dead on the way to his truck from fentanyl poisoning.

Tony is the first murder victim in the story. he is the ex-business partner of Ian Ventham, who fires him. Tony was not always a good man, and a lot of his history is brought to light once the investigation starts. He was once into drug dealing and had killed a young boy. When trying to cover it up, he also had to have the cab driver killed to tie up loose ends; however, it was that order that ended up costing him his life when someone came looking for revenge.

Bogdan is the contractor hired to replace Tony after his death. He worked on various projects around Coopers Chase, such as fixing stuff and installing security systems. Bogdan’s culpability in Tony’s murder is not revealed until the end of the story. When he finally comes clean about his crimes, it is to Stephan as they play chess; the reason behind him killing Tony was in revenge for Tony ordering the murder of his friend, the cab driver. Bogdan was also the one who murdered Gianni, as he was the one to pull the trigger. Bogdan is never found guilty or turned in for his crimes.

Matthew Mackie is a complicated character. His backstory appears to change many times as the story progresses. In the beginning, he is known as a priest who has come to Coopers Chase to argue in favor of keeping the church and its graveyard as is. Later, it is discovered that there is no record of him every being a priest because he had his title stripped so that a past love of his could be buried in the cemetery. He has returned to help protect her memory from the construction Ian is trying to go ahead with.

Jason is Ron Ritchie’s son and a former boxing champion. He is now doing television and other things to promote himself since he can no longer fight, but at one point in time, he had gotten himself in trouble for a few years dealing drugs. He is dragged into the murder case because he was involved with Tony a few years back, and he is one of the men in the picture that the murderer left behind at the scene of the first murder. Jason’s name is cleared by Elizabeth and the others.

Karen is the daughter of Gordon Playfair and is the woman that Ian was trying to coerce into getting her father to sign him over the land they own. Ian visited her several times trying to bribe her by talking about how much she would get if she could convince her father to sell; however, as confirmed later when Jason accuses her of being the one to murder Ian, she would rather live on her farm with her dad, than have money and know that he was miserable.

Chris is the lead investigator on the Tony Curran case and works closely with Donna throughout the story. He is described as a single man with a very clear idea of the type of woman he wants. He is doing his best to lose weight—a task that Donna takes upon herself to help with. He is hesitant at first to work with The Thursday Murder Club, but eventually comes to trust them and realize that they are an asset in solving the case.

Penny was a former detective who, once retired, became one of the founding members of The Thursday Murder Club, before falling ill and succumbing to the harsher aspects of her disease. She is in a coma in Willows, the on-site hospital at Coopers Chase Retirement, and while it is not confirmed if she can hear them or not, her husband John and Elizabeth spend most days there with her. Penny was the murderer of the body they found in the grave, having taken an act of revenge on behalf of a young girl killed by her boyfriend. She never told anyone until her delirium let it slip one day to John, a loyal husband to her, who never told a soul.

John is very quiet throughout the story, spending all of his time sitting in his wife’s room during visiting hours. At the end, after discovering Penny’s murder, Penny’s husband is found to be guilty of the murder of Ian. He admits to Elizabeth and the group that he had killed before—putting people out of their misery as he called it—which is what he did for Ian. In killing him with a shot of fentanyl, he was also protecting Penny by stopping people from discovering what she had done. Knowing that Elizabeth has to tell the police, he takes his time to say goodbye to his wife and gives for a fatal dosage of fentanyl, so that she can go in peace. It is insinuated that he also takes his life when going home that night, and that the police would find him dead in the morning.