I'd love one of those books that's a caper around the world, but that also has some truth about the world, and also makes you laugh and has also has some of the aesthetic of Thursday Murder Club, but it's Da Vinci Code.

The Man Who Died Twice” picked up where its predecessor left off and proved to be another skillfully constructed and brilliantly entertaining tale packed with intrigue, humor and adventure. We know by now that outwitting international drug-dealers would be child’s play to the Club’s omnicompetent leader, retired spy Elizabeth, but she has more pressing concerns. I would only add on a personal note that it’s a particular challenge to read this book while attempting a sugar-free diet. On this outing, the “four harmless pensioners” turn their attention to the case of Bethany Waites, a television reporter who, one night 10 years ago, while investigating a massive tax fraud operation, was in a car that went over a cliff.

The foursome’s cosy relationship with the local Fairhaven police detectives – young Donna and her boss, Chris – is now established as a firm friendship; the wonderfully buff Polish handyman Bogdan is likewise reliably on hand. And I thought, that's quite a fun detective, a reluctant traveller, having to go around the world and saying 'oh god, really? Clearly no other novelist ­working today can come up with anything to match the pleasure of spending time with Joyce, Elizabeth, Ibrahim and Ron as they pore over the details of unsolved murders in the Jigsaw room at Coopers Chase retirement village.

However, every now and then, Osman offsets the frivolity with pathos, not least when Elizabeth watches her husband, Stephen, slide further into the dark depths of dementia.Ron reaches out to longtime master criminal Jack Mason, who in old age has become a lonely soul after learning the hard way that “your henchmen are not real friends. What is clear after reading both novels is that Osman is a very much a one-trick pony, whose trademark is subverting expectations about the elderly in a series of attention-grabbing asides," wrote Joan Smith in the Times last year. I managed to steel myself to all the Twixes, but the throwaway reference to chocolate fingers on p284 nearly broke me.

The plot introduces some new bad people: a local teenage thug; a tough-nut female drug dealer who (helpfully) goes weak at the knees around Bogdan; a high-level underworld “middle man” from whom mafia diamonds have been stolen on impulse by a raffish ex-husband of Elizabeth’s.

Nevertheless there are several surprises sprung along the way, and other compensations include the usual neat one-liners and, in the person of a scrupulously polite Canadian psychopath, one of Osman’s best comic characters. It helps that their leader, Elizabeth Best, is ex-secret service, and is always having hilarious flashbacks to East Berlin in 1970. You've got two working class characters, two middle class characters, two very strong women, two slightly more brittle men. This book does fall down a bit when it comes to the plot: Osman has proved a decent enough plotter in the past, but I suspect a couple of major reveals here will have been foreseen by most readers a few hundred pages in advance.