The Appeal

The Appeal is a mystery novel by the British writer Janice Hallett, published in 2021 and her first. It is told entirely in documents, through the emails, notes and messages that the people involved exchanged.

The Fairway Players are a village theatre group rehearsing a play when tragedy strikes the family of Martin Hayward, the director, and Helen, his wife and the production's star. Their granddaughter, who is very young, has been found to have a rare cancer, and the treatment that could help is experimental and priced far beyond what the family can pay.

The cast rallies to raise the money, but not everybody is convinced that the treatment works or that the people collecting for it are honest. As suspicion spreads through the group, matters come to a head at the dress rehearsal, and the next morning a dead body is found.

Hallett hands the assembled documents to two law students, who are asked to work out what really happened and to identify what the file leaves out, which places the reader in the same position. Because everything is shown through what the characters wrote to one another rather than narrated, the reader sees only part of each scene and has to fill in the gaps. It is a standalone novel.