The Appeal

 

 

 

By Janice Hallett
Narrated by Daniel Philpott, Aysha Kala, Rachel Adedeji, Sid Sagar
Length: 12 hrs and 26 mins
Unabridged Audiobook
Release date: 01-25-22

 

 

The Fairway Players, a local theatre group, is in the midst of rehearsals when tragedy strikes the family of director Martin Hayward 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 castmates rally to raise the money to give her a chance at survival.
 
But not everybody is convinced of the experimental treatment’s efficacy—nor of the good intentions of those involved. As tension grows within the community, things come to a shocking head at the explosive dress rehearsal. The next day, a dead body is found, and soon, an arrest is made. In the run-up to an appeal, two young lawyers sift through the material—emails, messages, letters—with a growing suspicion that the killer may be hiding in plain sight. The evidence is all there, between the lines, waiting to be uncovered.

 

JUST WHO IS THE BAD GUY IN THIS STORY? Glad I stuck with it
 
My daughter recommended this one. It the only reason why I didn't quit after the first 20 minutes because this book doesn't work well as an audiobook. I had to accept that fact and move on. It helped that in spite of the medium issues, the book was well written and caught my interest.

The Appeal is an interesting twist on the epistolary novel, told in e-mails rather than actually letters, there being a difference in the conventions between the two modes of communication, length being the most noteworthy. My immediate reaction was that the author chose the epistolary style out of laziness. That's what I thought when I was looking for excuses to downgrade the book. Still, listening to e-mails read out loud headers and all can be tedious. Where a reader would skim the headers, an audiobook has to read out all of the words on the page-- and it gets repetitive very quickly.

As I said, I quickly came to see just how wrong I was about the author being lazy. It's harder to do character development well, not easier, when you are limited to the words your characters would put down on paper and what other people have to say about those characters in their e-mails. There are multiple narrators, some of who are reliable and others of who are not. The reader has to work out who is reliable and who isn't, even as the characters in the book have to work out who is reliable and who isn't as they exchange e-mails.

All in all, it turned out to be a twisting, turning mare's nest of a well written mystery. It is halfway through the story before the name of the victim is revealed and even further into it until you learn whose conviction is being appealed. Janice Hallett, while a first time novelist, is a former magazine editor, a journalist, a playwright (NetherBard) and a screenwriter (Retreat). Her maturity and experience showed.

I'm giving this one just shy of four stars -- and can't wait until January for her second novel to be published.