Book Review: The Appeal - Janice Hallett

I was 25% of the way through reading this when I purchased the sequel. It is an utterly compelling murder mystery - not least because the death doesn't occur until well after the halfway point. Who dies? Why? Who did it? Why?! With every paragraph I felt myself trying to decipher the characters' motives.

A murder mystery set in an amateur dramatics society is a bit Simon Brett but this has much more bite. The premise is that we are reading through the evidence in a legal case. All we see are the emails and text messages between various people caught up in a grisly death. There are a couple of lawyers reading along with us who occasionally pop in to have some Socratic dialogue about what we've just read. Yes, it is a wee bit contrived. The emails have slightly too much exposition - but it is a startlingly good device for keeping the plot moving. I stayed up far too late flicking back and forth trying to untangle the web.

Despite the constraints of the format, each character has a recognisable style of writing - from the slightly dimwitted villager to the malicious bitch, they are each painted vividly. As the story reaches its conclusion, a more senior lawyer steps in to ask us some questions - what have we spotted? Personally, I'd have liked these "clues" at the start of the book - but it is a rather clever way to make you pause and think about what you've just read.

By the end, the foreshadowing become apparent - and I was left gasping at how well plotted the story had been. The Greek Chorus of lawyers nudges the reader in the right direction. I certainly caught a couple of the big twists, and was rather satisfied with the ones I didn't.

A brilliant mystery novel that, for once, lives up to the hype.