Appeal

I must hold my head up and admit to judging a book (entirely) by its cover. I had seen this book frequently in Waterstones but since it shared its design style with Richard Osman (for whom I have an irrational dislike) I dismissed this as a shallow piece of cosy crime fiction. In reality it is the intertwining story of an amateur dramatic society’s staging of a play and a GoFundMe appeal for a local girl who needs life saving cancer treatment that eventually results in murder. But who is the victim, who gets the blame and who really did it? And it turns out to be a very clever work, on two levels. First and most obviously, the updating of the epistolary novel to include email, texts, voice messages and interview transcripts. Secondly because of the plot structure — the frame narrative with the two legal pupils reviewing case evidence works very well and the underlying mystery is cleverly constructed — I did find myself looking back as I saw things in a new light as later messages…