Imagine you open your inbox one morning, and you are greeted by an email with a ginormous attachment. It contains hundreds of pages of written communications between members of a local theater group. A local theater group where a murder happened, and your boss thinks they arrested the wrong person. You are an aspiring lawyer, and together with a colleague, you are tasked with helping to solve the case.
That's the scenario in which "The Appeal" by Janice Hallett puts the reader at the beginning of the novel. What follows are 500 pages, mostly emails and text messages, that you have to get through in order to get the whole picture.
And with email, I truly mean the email format. Everything looks like somebody just printed out all the mails from various inboxes. Sender, receiver, subject; everything is there for every email. You even get the occasional error message when an email inbox doesn't exist. Everything feels very real and like you are a little fly on the wall, watching the social dynamic between the members of the theater group called "The Fairway Players".
The book starts sometime in early spring and puts us in a phase where the Fairway Players are starting to prepare their newest show. Shortly after that, the grandchild of the director gets diagnosed with a rare illness. The treatment is very expensive, so the whole group starts a crowdfunding campaign to collect all the necessary money.
Roughly 3/4 of the book plays in this scenario. Time runs out, everyone gets more stressed, there is still a new show to put together, and people don't always act in the best interest of the group.
The intimate format with the personal emails allows for a very distinctive look into the social dynamic of the group. You find some people sympathetic quite early, while others are just so annoying that every mail by them bothers you. And occasionally, someone behaves so weirdly that you ask yourself if they really are who they say they are.
Right before the new show is ready for prime time in July, the murder happens. You as a reader know who the victim is, but you don't yet know who did it and why. There are many suspects and different motives. But the solution to the whole case is somewhere in the emails you've read so far.
At this point, you can start trying to figure out the mystery by yourself. Or you can also continue reading and watch the two lawyers try to crack the case.
I obviously formed my own theories while reading, but in the end, there were a couple of twists and turns that I didn't anticipate. Luckily, the whole thing ends with a solution that didn't feel far-fetched like in other crime stories, which added to the realism of the book. You truly feel like this whole story could have happened in real life as well.
I breezed through that book in a way I haven't done for a while. I was hooked. The format kind of reminded me of "Murder in the Family", which also uses a similar-ish format (there, most of the text is a transcript of a TV show). For me, that was perfect, but I also read some reviewers who weren't into it at all. So it's definitely a hit or miss kind of situation.
But if you know that the story is told in this unusual format and it still sounds intriguing, I think you will love this book as well.
5/5 for me. The other books by this author all have a similar format, so I’m excited to read them as well.