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The Appeal - Janice Hallett

 


Description

ONE MURDER. FIFTEEN SUSPECTS.
CAN YOU UNCOVER THE TRUTH?

There is a mystery to solve in the sleepy town of Lower Lockwood. It starts with the arrival of two secretive newcomers, and ends with a tragic death. Roderick Tanner QC has assigned law students Charlotte and Femi to the case. Someone has already been sent to prison for murder, but he suspects that they are innocent. And that far darker secrets have yet to be revealed...

Throughout the amateur dramatics society's disastrous staging of All My Sons and the shady charity appeal for a little girl's medical treatment, the murderer hid in plain sight. The evidence is all there, waiting to be found. But will Charlotte and Femi solve the case? Will you?

The standout debut thriller of 2021 that delivers multiple brilliant twists, and will change the way you think about the modern crime novel.

Review

Very clever and certainly the new Agatha Christie.

This book consists entirely of emails, messages and post it notes. For the first half of the book we get to read page after page of this correspondence, with the two "law students" popping in every so often to converse with one another about what is happening. A lot of the time they don't have a clue as to what is going on, and that is reassuring as that was how I was feeling also.

As you can imagine the character depth is not there when we only get to read emails and messages amongst them. We get to build a sort of pen picture but there are far too many characters and apart from a few key players I could not retain who they all were. This may have been easier in a paperback rather than the kindle as there is a list of everyone at the beginning of the book.

Some of the emails seemed pointless, in fact one of the characters says in reply at one point, "why didn't you just ask me, you were stood right next to me a moment ago". Of course this is the mechanism of the book, but it got tiring for me.

Once we have all the evidence laid before us the two students begin to proffer theories about what has happened, and yet the reader is still in the dark as to what has happened. I began to lose interest at this point as theory after theory was expounded. 

I did guess part of what had happened it seems, but not all of it. This is where the author is indeed a successor to Agatha Christie. If you've read any of her books you will know what this means...

I'm giving this book 3 out of 5 stars. This book is from my own personal book shelf.

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