The Appeal: The smash-hit bestseller

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Though it wasn’t difficult to figure out who the culprit could be, some of the facts revealed in the process came as a surprise. One of my suspicions was proven correct but there were other little and some bigger surprises along the way making my reading experience a worthwhile one. There's reason to believe that the incarcerated person is actually innocent, however, but if they are, who is the murderer? All said and done, I loved feeling like a fly on the wall throughout this sordid and mysterious tale.

Towards the end of the book it can seem like an information dump but it's information I wanted to know.

They learn from Tanner that three correspondents have assumed false identities in some of their messages and actions, and one person does not actually exist. Unfortunately, her illness is a rare type of cancer, one that only extremely expensive medicine might be able to cure. It was certainly a novel approach to a narrative format but not one that I will be looking for again.

They intertwine, but I was too distracted for the brain power needed (perhaps December was the wrong month for this one)! The founders of the group are Martin Haywood and his wife, Helen who also own and operate The Grange Golf and Country Club.Are there problems and even fraud connected to the fundraising, and is the experimental drug even effective? We are experiencing delays with deliveries to many countries, but in most cases local services have now resumed. But I'm fascinated by this kind of very English, microcosmic story and while I'm delighted that I never have to spend time with these people in real life, I was delighted to observe them from afar.

A wholly modern and gripping take on the epistolary novel, The Appeal is a “daring…clever, and funny” ( The Times, London) debut for fans of Richard Osman and Lucy Foley. Also, though I’m labeling it a ‘thriller’ here for the sake of consistency, this novel is more of a small-town (er, village) whodunit. But the show must go on, and along with it so too does a charity campaign to raise money for an experimental treatment for young Poppy.

Thanks to the vast amount of details and the number of characters hiding secrets and lies, I was thoroughly unsuccessful. Now the reading tastes of these four when it comes to mystery novels is by no means similar, so in my thinking if four very different readers enjoyed it, then maybe, just maybe, I would too. It starts with the arrival of two mysterious newcomers to the small town of Lockwood, and ends with a tragic death. When Martin and Helen's two-year-old grandchild, Paige's daughter Poppy, is diagnosed with a brain tumour, their friends and hangers-on immediately form a committee to crowdfund an experimental new treatment from America.