On: The Appeal

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…