The Silent Appeal by Janice HallettMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Well, that's another exciting mystery set in Lower Lockwood!
I first discovered Hallett's work through an ARC of The Christmas Appeal - I still haven't read the first book, The Appeal. The format was, and still is, innovative - maintaining the same conceit of a Roderick Tanner, a retired KC, sending files to Femi Hassan and Charlotte Holroyd for their review and opinion - and letting you unravel the mystery with them through WhatsApp messages, emails, journals, case notes, as well as Hassan and Holroyd's own summaries. Not so many police transcripts in this one! I suppose a major difference between this novel and the Christmas novella is that in the Christmas one, if I remember correctly, they found a long-dead body and were in fact solving a cold case. Here, the murder just happened a year ago, and they're looking for clues to assist in an upcoming appeal - in the hopes of changing the outcome of a current sentencing. This gives it a little more urgency.
All the different formats makes for difficult - yet light - reading. It's breezy in the sense that you don't have to go through dense text, or filter the mystery through a singular narrator. You can really skim through the emails and messages. And yet, the multiple formats makes it hard to keep track of who's who and what's going on when - especially when the time skips a bit here and there. It's easy to get caught out by missing a crucial date, or a strange name change, because there's a tendency to disregard "unimportant" information like names and time stamps as mere "formatting". There is a list of characters near the start of the book, but it's a bit hard to refer to when you're reading the e-book; I have to say that this book is also best read in print.
One thing I still find very weird (interesting-weird, not bad-weird) about this format is that since you're reading in real time with the "detectives", you don't actually find out who got murdered until about 80% in. I mean, you kinda know there is a murder because it's mentioned at the start, but for the rest of the time until the body is found, it's mostly gossip, jealousy, and affairs (and lots of admin) surrounding The Fairway Player's staging of Agatha Christie's play, The Hollows. The difference this makes is that because you don't know who got murdered, you can't really start forming opinions on who might be the killer until that point!
And there's so much going on between the characters. The Silent Appeal leans heavily on the themes of jealousy. There are various affairs (and accusations of affairs), casting envy, professional (well, as professional as amateur theatre can get) rivalry, as well as the mysterious reappearance of Sarah-Jane's sister, Nicky-Rose. Nicky-Rose is the one who really throws things off kilter, as well as Issy, who's apparently a character from the first book. I thoroughly hated Issy (ugh, so annoying!) and hoped many times that she'd get killed.
Ultimately, I did enjoy reading The Silent Appeal, but it's not a format that I'll especially look forward to for murder mysteries, especially since you don't quite get the murder aspect of the mystery until you're almost at the end.
Note: I received a digital ARC of this book from Atria Books via Edelweiss. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own.
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