The Last Devil to Die by Richard Osman
Published 2023 · 105,000 words · about 7 hours at an average pace · Mystery, Crime Fiction, Cozy Mystery, Contemporary Fiction
How hard is The Last Devil to Die to read?
The Last Devil to Die scores 32 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it moderately challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 28 out of 100
- Osman writes in plain, contemporary British English — dialogue drives almost every scene, and specialized terms are limited to occasional antiques-trade words (provenance, netsuke) and routine police vocabulary that context always clarifies. It reads close to Beach Read (30): accessible prose built for velocity, not vocabulary.
- Sentence structure: 27 out of 100
- Sentences run short and declarative, often broken into one-line paragraphs for comic timing, and chapters rarely run more than a few pages. It sits below 1984's already-plain declaratives (35), closer to the contemporary ease of Beach Read (30).
- Abstraction: 36 out of 100
- The plot stays concrete — murder investigation, retirement-village routines, courtroom logistics — but Joyce's diary entries and Elizabeth's private reckoning with Stephen's dementia introduce real meditation on memory, identity, and what a person becomes when their mind goes. That lands it just below Atomic Habits' concrete-example abstraction (38) despite the genre-fiction surface.
- Information density: 33 out of 100
- Multiple threads run at once — a heroin-smuggling operation, antique provenance, police procedure, three separate romantic subplots — but each is explained clearly and revisited often. It sits just below The Housemaid's plot-driven density (35): a lot happens, but nothing demands re-reading.
- Narrative indirection: 30 out of 100
- Most chapters are direct close-third-person, but Joyce's diary entries add a layer of curated self-presentation — she edits what she tells her own page. That puts it between Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret's directness (25) and 1984's plain third-person exposition (35).
- Symbolic density: 26 out of 100
- This is a cozy mystery that mostly means what it says. The antique devil figurines carry mild symbolic weight — temptation and greed literally boxed inside collectible objects — but Osman doesn't lean on metaphor to carry meaning. It sits just below Beach Read's light symbolic touches (30).
- Ironic distance: 38 out of 100
- Osman's narration is wry about institutional pomposity — police procedure, retirement-village bureaucracy, the machinery of the drug trade — without undermining the characters he clearly loves. It lands just above It Ends with Us's direct emotional register (35), nowhere near real satire.
- Resolution withholding: 32 out of 100
- The murder resolves the way Osman's plots always do, briskly and with a twist held back for the end. But Stephen's arc closes on earned, open-ended grief rather than tidy comfort, pulling the book between Beach Read's HEA closure (25) and Beloved's lingering haunt (40).
- Structural complexity: 36 out of 100
- The book alternates third-person chapters across the ensemble cast with Joyce's first-person diary entries, a real formal device beyond strict linearity. It sits above Beach Read's straightforward structure (28), well below Gatsby's frame narration (55).
How The Last Devil to Die is regarded
The Last Devil to Die holds a literary regard score of 31 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.