I love being given the opportunity to update our school library which is a unique space for both senior students and staff to access high quality literature. This is definitely a must-buy. It kept me absolutely gripped from cover to cover and is exactly the kind of read that just flies off the shelves. It has exactly the right combination of credible characters and a compelling plot thatI just could not put down. This is a great read that I couldn't stop thinking about and it made for a hugely satisfying read. I'm definitely going to order a copy and think it will immediately become a popular addition to our fiction shelves. 10/10 would absolutely recommend.

This was so cleverly written. The story is told in multi media format
It has a lot of characters which can make it complicated to follow at times
The ending was a little obvious but it didn’t spoil my enjoyment

not my sort of book, i’m really disappointed because I know it was enjoyed by I have loads of people but I really couldn’t get into it, sorry

This is told entirely in emails, text messages and essays. At first I was thinking, how are we ever going to know these people? However the sharp writing soon made everything very clear.

I loved it. Was so original and fresh, the author is asking you to be the detective and there is very little telling and alot of showing.

There is very little we can say without any spoilers but I really enjoyed it, couldn't put it down and will definitely give it another read at some point now I know what to look out for.

Thanks to the author, publisher and Netgalley for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

This was such a unique style of writing and at first I worried I wouldn’t be able to follow it but I quickly became used to the format and flew through, desperate to know who had been murdered and who was the murderer! The way this was written in email and text format was perfect for allowing us an insight into the characters and their personalities and state of mind which helped when everything started kicking off. Thoroughly enjoyed this one!

The way this book is presented aligns perfectly with the story being told. I loved the detail and found it very immersive as I waded through evidence along with the protagonists. There is a lot of information and you need to pay attention but this won’t be a problem as the story keeps up a consistently strong pace.

An intriguing concept for a book, The Appeal sounded like something I'd quickly become obsessed with and unable to put down.
While the plot is good, I couldn't figure out if I was enjoying this book or not!
I'm sure for Janice Hallett, it must've taken a serious amount of planning to be able to write a book in this format, with the many pages of evidence, all the different characters and their involvement, interwoven with Femi and Charlotte who are trying to uncover the truth in order to successfully lodge an appeal for the wrongly imprisoned character.
There were parts of this book that were too much for me, the correspondence between all the different characters got a little bit tedious in the middle and I struggled to follow what exactly was going on. I don't know if it was overcomplicated or I was just lost with the number of characters and the multiple different plot lines.
Ultimately I was a little disappointed with this book. It lost my interest in the end and I just wanted to know what had happened and why. The ending also fell a bit flat for me unfortunately. The writing, the interwoven plot lines and the way they story is given to the reader as full transcripts was really interesting and I felt the book did that really well. It just struggled to hold my attention by the end.
I'm sure there will be other readers who won't be able to put this book down ... Maybe I just didn't have the brainpower to figure it all out!
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Thanks to NetGalley, the publisher and Janice Hallett for the advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

Unfortunately I had to stop reading by 15% . I have tried to get back to it but I couldn’t get into the story and I gave up in the end.

Very grateful to the publisher for my review copy

I absolutely loved this book. I loved the layout, it looks a big book but I just found that I whizzed through it very quickly - I didn’t want to stop reading! I loved the characters and their sneaky ways! A truly fantastic read. I’ve already bought several as presents to give this year!

What an incredible concept! I have previously loved novels that combine standard prose with snippets of different formats (see: A Good Girl's Guide to Murder) but The Appeal throws out everything we know about how to tell a story. Hallett perfectly captured the attention of readers and further proved her worth by keeping us on the edge of our seats trying to figure out who, what and how a murder could have happened in this small close-knit community.

One of the best books I’ve read this year!
I wasn’t sure about it being written in email format but I couldn’t put it down, it had me gripped from the first page.
There’s a wide range of characters in the book but once you figure out who is related to who it makes it a bit easier.
If you are in a reading slump this book is guaranteed to get you out of it!

This is very likely to be the best book I will read all year! This is a very gripping novel told in a very innovative manner, emails, texts and other pertinent documents. This format really helped you to feel like one of the law students who have received this mystery dossier. This novel is a must for all thriller fans!

My thanks to Viper books who sent me the copy of 'The Appeal', which is out now AND is the Waterstones paperback thriller of the month! I won it in a competition on Twitter and was so excited to dive into this book, which I would describe as the bastard offspring of 'Ladies Of Letters', 'The Rutshire Chronicles', 'The Witness For The Prosecution', created in Janice Hallett's fevered imagination.

it is quite something to redefine the 'whodunnit' genre, another altogether to do the same to the epistolary novel simultaneously!

'The Appeal' works on so many levels it has literally left my head spinning whilst I want to applaud the ingenuity of the plot, the characterisations, the intricate relationships between each person involved in the murder of an unknown individual, whose identity is not revealed until well over the halfway point.

From the title itself, which can refer to the appeal made by Roderick Tanner to his junior colleagues to see if they come to the same conclusions as him, the appeal against a possibly erroneous incarceration, or, the appeal to raise vital funds for 2 year old Poppy's fight against brain cancer, all of this cumulates in a delicious ball of appellation to the reader to get involved themselves.

Written in the form of transcribed, chronological text messages, emails, Whatsapp (or, Whats Up as it is referred to several times, quite accurately I think!) this represents a timeline in a murder case. You are unaware of anything regarding Femi and Charlotte, the two individuals tasked with going through the evidence with fresh eyes.

You are not told who is murdered.

You are not told who has been imprisoned for the murder.

You are not told who is in the frame, the reasons why, and if the appeal is coming from the defence or prosecution side of the case.

And so, it begins...

What looks like, to the untrained eye, to be a spate of fairly incongruous communications between a village with a strict hierarchical order organising their am-dram production of Arthur Miller's 'All My Sons', descends into allegations of fraud, embezzlement, character assassination and the pursuit of the truth. The further you read, the more your mind starts creating pictures of the kind of people these villagers are, there are some truly hilarious moments (I am thinking of the Yogathon in particular) which balance out the truly despicable notion that someone is trying to undermine a charity fundraiser for a sick 2 year old girl.

The girl in question, Poppy, is the daughter of the owners of 'The Grange;, basically the all but landed gentry seat of the village where there are several dynastic cross overs. On one hand are the Reswicks, Poppy's family the Haywards, and on the other, the MacDonalds and the Dearings.

The Fairway Players, the local drama group, fresh from their success with 'Blithe Spirit', decide that 'All My Sons'  will be a charity fundraiser for the 'A Cure For Poppy' appeal. However, a recently returned nurse from Africa, has concerns around the experimental treatment that is being proposed for Poppy.

This nurse, Sam and her husband Kel, are brought into the Fairway Players by Issy, a fellow nurse in the 'Jelly Antics' (geriatrics) ward of the local hospital. From Issy's emails, it appears she and Sam have made firm friends and that Issy is a lonely woman who clings to Sam and feels she stands taller when she is around.

What is so interesting is that Sam is one of a small number of characters whose 'voices' are not heard directly-your impression of them is formed by reading the way she is perceived by the members of the community.

As you, Femi and Charlotte dig deeper, will you work out who the victim is before they are revealed?

Is it one of the wealthy owners of The Grange who may harbour dark secrets behind their grand façade? Could it be neurotic Issy who has found out something she shouldn't have? Is it Sam, or Kel, who have not been clear about their reasons for leaving Africa? Or is it the dr who is pioneering the fund raising drive and this U.S based experimental drug?

I worked out who was the victim, who was incarcerated, was on the right(ish) track for the killer (or killers, I'm not saying!) but the ending came as a pretty big shocker, in spite of all that.

A wonderfully engaging read which I found next to impossible to stop once I had started, I recommend this novel unreservedly!

WOW, WOW, WOW
I am very impressed with what I have just read. The book is full of twists and turns- just what I love. The plot is interesting and characters are full of charisma.

This is an interesting book to read, full of twists and turns, and giving you the chance to play detective. It hooks you in from the start, and will keep you reading to the conclusion. The clues are all there, although sometimes you don't see them, and I found myself flicking back quite a few times, so it's probably best read in a book rather than ebook format.

This would make a great present for all the amateur detectives in your life.

Firstly, interesting premise for a book, being written completely in emails and text messages. However, I was reading a galley of the book and the formatting was horrific. No spaces at all, so it was painful trying to work out what message ended where. This is not a representation of the finished book though, I checked and it’s much easier to read!

I was interested reading the evidence through, but from about 80% where we began just reading the correspondence of the trainee lawyers investigating the case, they lost me completely. Too many rehashes of who dunnit? Who was who? Etc. Then they seemed to make a huge huge leap away from evidence that we were presented to get to their final decision on who was guilty and why. Just didn’t believe it. Sorry. Not for me.

The Appeal has a very clever format that puts us at the centre of an appeals case. Just like anyone else involved in the case we are presented with documents, emails and text messages that might add up to case for appeal, but it might not. We don’t even know who the victim is or who is already in prison for the crime. It’s up to us to piece it all together. All the evidence concerns a local amateur dramatics group and the couple who run the group ‘s fundraiser for their granddaughter. Little Poppy has a brain tumour and the money is for a radical new treatment in America.

The author has taken my creative writing tutor’s words to heart; show the reader rather than tell them. We are left to put together these characters from what she shows us: Issy Beck’s emails are excitable and almost childlike but also give us a hint of her nature underneath, her anxiety and possible obsessions come through in her own voice. Sarah - Jane comes across as very capable and best placed to run a fundraising campaign. There’s nothing superfluous to guide us just characters own communications. Slowly we make our own connections and come to our own conclusions. This book shouldn’t work because it isn’t the normal fast paced thriller. Every character is so well drawn and there’s an element of satire about a certain class and type of person here. Imagine the people in your village who run the Parish Council and you’ll have some idea. It’s rather like The Casual Vacancy, but even better. I really enjoyed this unusual take on the murder mystery theme, it’s inventive and puts us in the position of a QC just presented with the file. It’s up to us to make sense from these documents and decide whether there is a case to appeal.

This was such a fun read, different to anything I’ve read for a long while. We follow two law students as they’re given a file of documents relating to a murder and as the reader we get to see everything that they get given – emails, text messages, records of 999 calls and notes and slowly you piece together who everyone is and what it is that’s happened. We know from the start that someone has been murdered, and someone has been convicted of murder but we don’t know who. We also get told that not everyone is as they seem. This was so intriguing to me! When I first started reading I did think it was going to be hard to keep track of who was who as this novel has quite a large cast of characters but I found the voices are very distinct and once I got into the novel it was easy to follow what was happening. I did work out what had happened from the clues throughout but I had so much fun working it out that I would absolutely recommend this novel!

A taut, original thriller that kept me guessing. Recommended! Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for the chance to read this ARC

Oh my what a great book. I loved this book and have recommended to others that they really should buy it and read it when it comes out. I couldn’t put it down, I really hope Janice writes another book and can I please be fist in line for an advanced copy? Highly recommend,