The Appeal: The smash-hit bestseller

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One of the most enjoyable books I've read all year. Extremely addictive, it will reel you in, one piece of evidence at a time. Ingenious and highly original -- Alex Pavesi, author of Eight Detectives I wasn’t aware of any other writing while working on my first two novels. If it’s a movement, then hopefully it’s like most movements in art – it arises naturally in response to what we as a society choose to consume as entertainment. A lot of readers say they like that my style is different, so it could simply be that a change is as good as a rest… Synopsis: The Fairway Players, a local theatre group, is in the midst of rehearsals for an Arthur Miller play, when tragedy strikes the family of director Martin Haywood and his wife Helen, the play’s star. Their young granddaughter has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and with an experimental treatment costing a tremendous sum, their fellow castmates rally to raise money.

Hallett seems to have done that rae things of pleasing the classicists and the modernists…no mean feat for her first novel! The Appeal is also a love letter to another kind of masquerade, to acting even in amateur dramatics. As Issy writes to James Hayward, Martin’s son and the play director, who’s called away to his heavily pregnant wife’s bedside ahead of the opening night performance: Her latest is entitled The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels and it’s out 19 January 2023. The story involves a two rival authors, Amanda Bailey and Oliver Menzies, who are both researching a the mad case of a cult that brainwashed a teenage girl and convinced her that her newborn baby was the anti-Christ and tried to kill the baby. Now, that child is 18 and both Amanda and Oliver think there’s a story in it. Indeed, there is, but it’s not quite what they anticipated… Martin and Helen reveal that Helen lost a child to meningitis years ago, before their children Paige and James were born. I haven’t read All My Sons for a while, and my memory is fuzzy, but I’m pretty sure it’s about a family who is hiding a dark and shameful secret. If anyone has insights into the connection between the play and this story, please let me know in comments!What are the advantages and disadvantages to you as an author, or to the reader, of telling a story in this way? So many writers have inspired me: Cervantes, Thomas Hardy, Emily Bronte, Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton, Patricia Leitch, Douglas Adams… and that’s only a few. When their little grand-daughter Poppy falls ill with a rare form of brain cancer they launch an appeal to raise a massive amount for a revolutionary, and as yet untried treatment, available only in the States. At the same time The Fairway Players continue to mount a production of All My Sons by Arthur Miller. Through their cast lists and committee minutes we are provided with a handy aide-memoir to who's who. Publication of The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels in January, of course! I’m also in the middle of writing book four and even I think this one is devious.

The summary files, as you say, are just an irritating way of summarising what we already know and don't add anything. It's like the author doesn't trust you to follow anything. I raced through it and liked it a lot, but I did find the law student framing really annoying and contrived: We have some exciting news. The English author Janice Hallett has a new novel on the way, and if you’ve read The Appeal or The Twyford Code, you’ll know just what a big deal this is. She’s an author who has caught the imagination of crime fiction lovers everywhere, writing cleverly layered mysteries that roll together elements of half-forgotten secrets, true crime, made-up urban myths and a peculiar sense of, well, Englishness that’s definitely amusing but is hard to actually describe.A totally original take on a thriller - intriguing and dark but with a dash of humour - I raced through it -- Catherine Cooper, author of The Chalet Is Sam just being paranoid given her unhappy history with Tish? Or is something truly sinister afoot, something that could cost one or more of the Fairway Players their lives as Sam seeks to expose the truth?

If you're looking for a crime novel that is very different but very satisfying I thoroughly recommend The Appeal by Janice Hallett. I loved it -- Elly Griffiths, bestselling author of The Postscript Murders From Matt Wesolowski’s Six Stories to Only Murders in the Building, fictional true crime and epistolary storytelling have become pretty popular – it might even be a movement. Do you see it that way and why do you think readers are gravitating to this and indeed to true crime? It was initially inspired by a script I wrote many years ago, and which I rewrote for this novel. It didn’t go anywhere as a film script, but the story never left me. While searching for my next project I read it again and my first thought was ‘this feels like it happened many years ago’ – possibly because I’d written it many years ago – but for some reason it felt like an historic case. That triggered the idea for a present-day true crime author attempting to rehash an old crime story for a low-budget beach read – and unexpectedly uncovers aspects to the case no one realised at the time. Yeah, it’s too early to tell how Hallett might compare to Christie, and at this stage in Agatha’s career even she wouldn’t have been seen as the force she went on to be.Munchausen by Proxy is typically an individual mental illness resulting in abuse perpetuated by a single person, usually a mother, who has control over the victim, typically a child. Why do Martin and Poppy’s parents agree to be in on the deception? Paige, Poppy’s mother, doesn’t seem to be in on it. But how is that possible?