The Appeal

I must hold my head up and admit to judging a book (entirely) by its cover. I had seen this book frequently in Waterstones but since it shared its design style with Richard Osman (for whom I have an irrational dislike) I dismissed this as a shallow piece of cosy crime fiction.

In reality it is the intertwining story of an amateur dramatic society’s staging of a play and a GoFundMe appeal for a local girl who needs life saving cancer treatment that eventually results in murder. But who is the victim, who gets the blame and who really did it? And it turns out to be a very clever work, on two levels.

First and most obviously, the updating of the epistolary novel to include email, texts, voice messages and interview transcripts. Secondly because of the plot structure — the frame narrative with the two legal pupils reviewing case evidence works very well and the underlying mystery is cleverly constructed — I did find myself looking back as I saw things in a new light as later messages revealed more information.

I’m not convinced that I would have guessed the murderer myself (there was a lot of misdirection and almost everyone had something to hide) but I did enjoy reading this. The author does a great job of getting the different character voices across and also painting an effective picture of village life despite the restrictions imposed by her chosen medium (you can’t just dump a pile of expository text for background, for example).

I was wrong about Ms Hallett and will gladly admit it and read more of her work!