After reading and enjoying The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett, I was interested in reading more from her. So when I had a long trip, I decided to borrow the book as a palate cleanser between all the nonfiction I was reading.

And wow. I started this book only intended to read a chapter or two and then, two and a half hours later, found that I had finished the whole book (looking at the remaining flight times at the start and end). It was that engrossing and addictive for me.

Told mainly through email and text correspondence (with interview transcripts and a summary document taking up the rest of the space), The Appeal charts the story of two newcomers – Sam and Kel – who join a local acting troupe. The granddaughter of the troupe’s leaders is ill with cancer and Sam has a very clingy new friend, which means that things eventually get more and more complicated as the group raises money in an appeal for treatment funds, culminating with the death of one of the characters. The death comes pretty late in the book so I won’t mention who.

The epistolary format of this story isn’t new, but I really enjoyed it and thought it worked very well. I managed to get a good sense of the group dynamics just through all the emails and messages, and since each letter was short, I just kept reading. Towards the end, the reader is guided through the deduction; if you’re in a problem solving frame of mind, it would be easy to pause the book and try to work it out yourself. If you’re not, you can always just continue reading and follow along the deductions of the two law students who were asked to look at this case. I did think that it was strange that they were asked to work on this, as they were led by the suspect’s lawyer for most of the time, but I suppose the ending made sense and anyway, I enjoyed reading this so much I didn’t question the premise too much. 

With regards to characters, I think Sam and Tish, the aid worker turned nurse and the little girl’s lawyer, are the most interesting. Issey, another key figure, definitely comes across as annoying so she didn’t really appeal to me; rather I found her more as an object of pity, where you feel like you should be her friend because she needs one but she also is annoying to be around. For Sam and Tish, on the other hand, their conflict and personality had layers and I particularly liked how Tish slowly changed over the course of the book. I have to admit that Tish’s motivations were one thing that I managed to guess correctly before the denouement, so I may also be biased here. 

Overall, though, I found this to be an entertaining and clever read. I think The Twyford Code is slightly more ingenious in how it pulls off its twist/solution, but The Appeal does a great job of using the epistolary format to tell a murder mystery.