The heart of the novel is in the friendships between the characters. These relationships are the most important thing in life. Osman, in an interview with his publisher, said:

You don’t choose your family, but you do choose your friends, and I love the strength of the friendships between Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron, and Ibrahim, and the lengths they will go to protect one another and to protect their friends. They know that one day they will lose one another, and they make the most of the days they have (“The Bullet that Missed Reader’s Guide.” Penguin Random House.).

As Viktor says, “It’s the people in the end, isn’t it?” (407). The friend group includes the members of the Thursday Murder Club. They “carried a kind of magic, the four of them” (40), that is, Joyce, Elizabeth, Ron, and Ibrahim. Bogdan is adopted by this group in a previous installment of Osman’s series. In this novel, his friendship with Stephen, Elizabeth’s husband, is touching. They play chess together and Bogdan helps groom Stephen as Stephen’s dementia progresses. At the end of the book, Stephen forgets how to play chess, which saddens Bogdan, but he is still there for his friend.