The Appeal: The smash-hit bestseller

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From the latest Scandinavian serial killer to Golden Age detective stories, we love our crime novels!

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. 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…

Review

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!

I raced through it and liked it a lot, but I did find the law student framing really annoying and contrived: What are the advantages and disadvantages to you as an author, or to the reader, of telling a story in this way?

Hallett, a screenwriter before she turned to fiction, defined “cosy crime” as a genre that “reduces the horror, and amplifies the mystery,” creating a “safe space to consider and to explore the very worst experiences of humanity”. The members of a drama club come together in the face of tragedy, unaware they could be the victims of an ongoing fraud. But not everybody is convince of the good intentions of those involved. New actress Sam raises doubts. I still don’t really understand why Issy agrees (offers?) to take the fall for James. It made no sense to me.

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. Sam tells James she knows what’s going on. James kills Sam, using his twins’ birth as an alibi. Issy knows James did it, but for some reason, she agrees to keep his secret. Wholly original, constructed as delicately as a spiderweb, and as heartfelt as it is intelligent, I could not stop reading The Appeal -- Catriona Ward, author of The Last House on Needless Street The Appeal was told mainly through letters, and The Twyford Code through transcripts. What documents do you use to tell the story in The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels? These are the people you have to see in private practice: the epitome of white entitlement. They think the earth should stop turning for their child to be cured. It doesn’t occur to them no one else is as committed to their family as they are. If they’d seen what we have, they’d be grateful for the many privileges they not only take for granted, but demand, with no sense of their own insignificance in the world. They could afford these drugs if they sold their assets, but they are affronted by the very idea of paying for healthcare and prefer others to foot the bill.

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Hallett seems to have done that rae things of pleasing the classicists and the modernists…no mean feat for her first novel! You were inspired by true crime and Michelle McNamara’s book I’ll Be Gone in the Dark. What is it that interests you about the genre and that book? 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? 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?