The Appeal
By Janice Hallett
- Genre
- Mystery, Crime & Thriller
- Publisher
- Viper
- Publication year
- 2021
- ISBN
- 9781788165297
When a small English theatre group mounts a play to raise money for a sick child, a web of gossip, rivalry and deceit unfolds, and someone ends up dead. Janice Hallett's debut is told almost entirely through emails and text messages, inviting the reader to sift the evidence. It won the 2022 CWA...
Janice Hallett hands the reader a bulging case file - emails, texts, the odd official document - and, in effect, deputizes them: two law students have been asked to review the correspondence surrounding a suspicious death in an amateur dramatic society, and so must we. Out of the chatter of a small English town's theatre group, its fundraising appeal for a gravely ill child, and the vanities and grudges beneath, a murder slowly assembles itself. The Appeal revives the Golden Age puzzle for the inbox era, its pleasures those of pure detection: the reader is genuinely equipped to solve it, if attentive enough to notice who is lying in the gaps between messages. Hallett choreographs an intricate plot with real control, and the epistolary form keeps a large cast vivid and distinct. For anyone who loves a fair-play mystery and enjoys doing the work, this is an ingenious, addictive debut - a whodunit that trusts its reader completely.