Author: Janice Hallett

Publisher: Atria Books

ISBN: 9781982187453

The members of a community theater group come together to support one of their own through a family tragedy, but tensions mount as people accuse one another of lies and deceptions. When someone in the group dies, everyone becomes a suspect. Author Janice Hallett uses the epistolary approach that starts with intrigue but loses steam halfway through her debut novel The Appeal.

In the small British town of Lockwood, the Fairway Players have wrapped up their most recent play and jump right into preparations for their next one with auditions. Everyone in the group knows that co-founder Helen Hayward will get the female lead. Helen always gets the lead. No one minds too much, because she’s a brilliant actress, and she and her husband, Martin, are generous with their time in making sure everyone gets to participate in some way, shape, or form.

Isabel is hoping for a larger part in the production; outside of theater and work, she doesn’t have much of a life. Always one eager to please, Isabel introduces newcomers Samantha and Kel Greenwood to the theater troupe. She’s hoping that she and Sam can become good friends; they both work at the same hospital as nurses in the geriatric ward, and now they’ll get to spend time together in the evenings at rehearsals too. So much fun!

The play comes to a temporary standstill when Martin and Helen get some devastating news: their two-year-old granddaughter, Poppy, has been diagnosed with a rare brain tumor. Martin’s son, James, volunteers to direct the show while his sister and Poppy’s mom, Paige, works with doctors and Martin offers moral support. Helen decides the show must go on and agrees to continue in her role.

The Fairway Players are nothing if not supportive and start a fundraising campaign for the expensive experimental treatment Poppy needs. Yet right from the beginning, it seems like something or the other throws hitches in their charity appeal. Someone promises to donate a huge sum, only to be proven a scammer later on. An innocent fib told about Poppy’s condition snowballs into a huge lie that spreads like wildfire throughout the community. And newcomer Samantha keeps asking questions that make everyone uncomfortable. It’s almost like she thinks Poppy actually isn’t sick at all, that the money being raised is going toward dubious means.

The theater group manages to keep rehearsing through all the challenges, but secrets start to get bigger and other lies start to build. After a heated dress rehearsal in which Sam accuses Martin and Helen of fraud, someone ends up dead. The appeal for charity turns into an appeal for answers about the murder, and the police have several suspects—all 15 of the members of the Fairway Players, in fact—who are equally capable and have equal motives for killing someone. 

As a legal team sifts through the evidence and all the correspondence leading up to the murder, they begin to realize they might need to make an appeal of a different kind: to get an innocent party out of prison and charge the murderer still running free.

Author Janice Hallett uses only forms of communication to tell her story. The book is comprised of emails, text messages, and media reports, leaving readers to piece together the events with their own intuition. For the first third of the book, as news comes of Poppy’s diagnosis and the Fairway Players share or hide their secrets, the epistolary style of storytelling works well. After that, however, the book slows to a crawling pace.

Because the Fairway Players group consists of 15 members and communication from all of them is included at some point, readers might find it hard to keep everyone straight. A cast of characters is provided at the start of the novel, which is unhelpful in a digital format where swiping back to the beginning of the book is inefficient at best. Also, Hallett clearly intended for some of the characters to be nothing more than comic relief or a distraction. While they perform those roles with ease, they also make it harder to figure out whether anything they’re saying contributes to the mystery overall.

Readers tuned into the genre will most likely figure out major parts of the mystery well before the characters do. The epistolary approach works in some places and does provide a few laughs, but for the most part it’s only partially successful. Those wanting a slightly different type of murder mystery might enjoy this. I recommend readers Borrow The Appeal by Janice Hallett.