The Christmas season has arrived in Lower Lockwood, and the Fairway Players are busy rehearsing their festive holiday production of Jack and the Beanstalk to raise money for a new church roof. But despite the season, goodwill is distinctly lacking among the amateur theatre enthusiasts with petty rivalries, a possibly asbestos-filled beanstalk, and some perennially absent players behind the scenes.
Of course, there’s also the matter of the dead body onstage. Who could possibly have had the victim on their naughty list? Join lawyers Femi and Charlotte as they investigate Christmas letters, examine emails, and pore over police transcripts to identify both the victim and killer before the curtain closes on their holiday production—for good.
I absolutely loved Janice Hallett’s The Appeal, which introduced the reader to the eclectic cast and crew of the Fairway Players: Lockwood’s premier amateur dramatics society. So I was delighted when I heard that the Fairway Players were back for a Christmas special – and that they’d have another dead body on their hands!
The Christmas Appeal picks up a couple of years after the ending of The Appeal and the passage of time has seen several changes in Lockwood – and in the makeup of the Fairway Players. The ever-organised Sarah-Jane and her husband Kevin have taken charge of the Fairway Players but their reign is being contested by former queen-bee Celia and her husband Joel. Two new estates – an executive development and a development of social housing – have brought new members and new tensions to the town. And reports of a murderer being spotted locally are bringing back uncomfortable memories of the events that marred the Players’ production of All My Sons.
Despite this, the show must go on and Sarah-Jane is determined that the Player’s charity Christmas panto, Jack and the Beanstalk, is going to be a success. She’s even hired an enormous vintage prop beanstalk (which may or may not contain deadly asbestos) to be the centrepiece of the production. Unfortunately open night gets off to the wrong kind of bang when, halfway through the production, a dead body in a Santa suit falls out of the beanstalk. Who is the victim? And who might have killed them? It’s up to lawyers Femi and Charlotte to investigate yet again.
Like its predecessor, The Christmas Appeal is told through a series of letters, emails, and texts. This form gives the novella real pace and compulsion – I steamed through it in a couple of evenings – and makes it a quick, pacy, and enjoyable seasonal read.
Catching up with the Fairway Players will prove to be a real delight for fans of The Appeal, especially given the changes in the hierarchy of the group. The simmering tensions and behind-the-scenes cattiness that made the first book such fun are back in abundance and, if anything, The Christmas Appeal is a funnier and lighter novel than its predecessor. The spirit of Christmas panto is infused through the text with a good dose of slapstick (including a drunken pantomime horse and the accidental purchase of some highly illegal ‘sweets’) and sarcasm to keep the pages turning and the laughs coming. Although a truly awful human being, I was particularly fond of snooty Celia’s communiques, the ‘holier-than-thou’ tone of which made me laugh out loud on more than one occasion.
Although the story of The Christmas Appeal does work as a standalone mystery, I do think you’ll get much more out of this festive novella if you’ve read The Appeal. Although Hallett alludes to previous events, there isn’t a huge amount of backstory provided and the relationships between the various characters aren’t outlined in any depth.
For fans of The Appeal, however, this return to the world of the Fairway Players is a welcome festive treat. Perfect for curling up with on a cold winter’s evening, this is a page-turning, light-hearted seasonal read. Although I read an eBook version (unusual for me as I struggle with e-reading), the hardback edition is beautifully presented (just look at that cover) and would make for the perfect Christmas present for a Hallett fan.
The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett is published by Viper Books and is available now from all good booksellers and online retailers including Hive, Bookshop.org, Waterstones, and Wordery.My thanks go to the publisher and to NetgalleyUK for providing a copy of the book in return for an honest and unbiased review.
Reviews on The Shelf are free, honest, and unbiased and I don’t use affiliate links on my posts. However, if you enjoy the blog, please consider buying me a coffee on Ko-Fi!
Happy New Year!! Yes, somehow it is now 2022 and that means its time for me to reveal my Best Books of 2021! I’ve decided to change the format a little this year – primarily because I’ve read so many fantastic books that trying to narrow them down to a list of five or ten title would be impossible! So instead of a list of reads, I’m going to give you a little narrative walkthrough of my favourite reads of the year, along with links to reviews or featured posts about those that I’ve covered in more detail (just click the book title and it should take you to the correct page).
Right back at the start of the year – my very first book of the year in fact – I read Eowyn Ivey’s To The Bright Edge of the World, a wonderful historical novel set amidst the wilderness of the Alaskan interior. I loved Eowyn’s first novel, The Snow Child, but, if possible, I adored this one even more. Although meditative in many ways, I became rapidly swept up in the tale of Colonel Allen Forrester and his exploration of the Wolverine River – and in the story of his wife Sophie, left at home but making new discoveries of her own. For any fans of historical novels, this one really is a must read.
The first few months of the year also saw me read Shaun Bythell’s amusing Confessions of a Bookseller, a sequel to his Diary of a Bookseller and a highly entertaining read for anyone who has ever wondered what running a bookshop is really like. I was also impressed by The Long Long Afternoon, Inga Vesper’s debut novel about secrets and lies in a picture perfect American suburb. The sultry heat and 1950s atmosphere practically rose off the page as I read! Summer sunshine and deadly secrets also permeated the pages of Alexandra Andrews’ page-turning psychological thriller Who Is Maud Dixon?
2021 has been a year for impressive debuts. I thoroughly enjoyed Emma Stonex’s The Lamplighters, with its combination of domestic drama, folk fable, and supernatural suggestiveness, whilst Virginia Feito’s Mrs Marchprovided a brilliant psychodrama of a woman teetering on the edge of crisis. Honourable mentions also need to go to Natasha Brown’s Assembly and Robert Jones Jr’s The Prophets – impressive, deeply moving novels with huge contemporary resonance that, although I never managed to put my feelings about them into words, have stayed with me long after turning the final page.
I wrote a double feature about two of my favourite crime novels of this year – Janice Hallett’s The Appealand Joseph Knox’s True Crime Story – but they weren’t the only crime novels I read and enjoyed. The genre remains a firm favourite of mine and other favourites from this year included K J Maitland’s historical novel The Drowned City, V L Valentine’s wryly amusing The Plague Letters, Elly Griffith’s compulsively readable second standalone novel The Postscript Murders, The Diabolical Bones – the second in Bella Ellis’s Bronte Mysteries series – and Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice.
I also enjoyed some historical true crime in the form of Thomas Morris’s fascinating account of The Dublin Railway Murder whilst other no-fiction favourites included Professor Alice Roberts’s enlightening Ancestors: A Pre-History of Britain in Seven Burials, Greg Jenner’s hilarious Ask a Historian, Natalie Hayne’s witty and enlightening Pandora’s Jar: Women in Greek Myth (all of which I reviewed in one post here), and Liz Jones’s fascinating biography of now-forgotten romance novelist Marguerite Jervis, The Queen of Romance.
2021 was also a good year for YA and Middle Grade reading. I’ve mentioned in a few posts that I’ve been reading more YA and Middle Grade as a result of taking part in blog tours for the wonderful folk at The Write Reads. And indeed, my favourite YA and Middle Grade reads of this year are all books I have read as part of their tours: Fireborn by Aisling Fowler, Instructions for Dancing by Nicola Yoon, and Kat Ellis’s Wicked Little Deeds.
A couple of gloriously gothic reads also deserve a mention: Rebecca Netley’s brilliantly spooky debut The Whistling, Rhiannon Ward’s The Shadowing, and Riley Sager’s Home Before Dark. I also read and adored the latest in Matt Wesolowski’s Six Stories – although my full review of Demon will not be coming until the new year!
Finally, the end of the year bought a small raft of brilliant fiction titles, including two of my favourite books of this year: the remarkable Piranesi by Susannah Clarke and quietly brilliant Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers (both reviewed here). I also adored Lauren Groff’s remarkable Matrix, another quietly brilliant novel that imagines the life of the extraordinary Marie de France and her relationship with Eleanor of Aquitaine. And a final mention has to go to Sarah Moss’s masterful The Fell. I didn’t think I’d want to read any pandemic fiction but, in Moss’s hands, the subject becomes a deeply human story of isolation and connection.
All in all, 2021 was a fantastic reading year. Even with all of the titles that I have mentioned here, I’m sure I’ve missed a few that I very much enjoyed! Out of the 122 books I read this year, the majority were 4 star reads or above. As always, I’d love to know if you’ve read and enjoyed any of my favourite reads – and please do tell me your top books of 2021 in the comments below!
Wishing you a very happy 2022 and here’s to another year of bookish delights!
Reviews on The Shelf are free, honest, and unbiased and I don’t use affiliate links on my posts. However if you enjoy the blog please consider buying me a coffee on Ko-Fi!
That’s right folks, today’s post is a double bonanza of crime fiction related goodness with reviews of two utterly fantastic crime novels that, although quite different in terms of tone and setting, both play with our readerly expectations and use their form and presentation to great effect. Both are strong contenders for my Books of the Year and, despite going into both with a fair bit of hype behind them, more than exceeded my expectations. So without further ado, let’s get to our first book!
Image Description: The cover of Janice Hallett’s The Appeal has an black and white line drawn illustration of a pretty village against a cream background. Over the window of one of the houses , there is a red ‘X’, with blood splatters to the edge of the image.
Someone was murdered. Someone went to prison. And everyone’s a suspect.
Dear Reader – enclosed are all the documents you need to solve a case. It starts with the arrival of two mysterious newcomers to the small town of Lockwood, and ends with a tragic death. Someone has already been convicted of this brutal murder and is currently in prison, but we suspect they are innocent. What’s more, we believe far darker secrets have yet to be revealed.
Throughout the Fairway Players’ staging of All My Sons and the charity appeal for little Poppy Reswick’s life-saving medical treatment, the murderer hid in plain sight. Yet we believe they gave themselves away. In writing. The evidence is all here, between the lines, waiting to be discovered. Will you accept the challenge? Can you uncover the truth?
Taking the form of a case file, Janice Hallett’s The Appealpresents crime fiction aficionados with a tantalising proposition: can you turn investigator and solve the case?
Told via a series of documents, The Appeal follows law students Femi and Charlotte as they delve into a lengthy trail of emails and documentary evidence to try and get to the bottom of the tragic death that rocked the small town of Lockwood in July 2018. Roderick Tanner QC is preparing to launch an appeal on behalf of the person who has been sent to prison for murder – but as the novel opens, you the reader don’t know who that is or even who has been murdered!
Instead you’re presented with a series of emails between the members of amateur theatrical society The Fairway Players. They’re preparing to welcome two new members – and to begin casting and rehearsals for a charity production of All My Sons which will be in aid of ‘A Cure for Poppy’, the charitable appeal set up to held the granddaughter of one of their leading members receive life-saving cancer treatment. But as the novel progresses – and Femi and Charlotte’s review of the evidence continues – it becomes apparent that all is not well in The Fairway Players. Amidst the traditional small town rivalries and petty power plays, darker forces are at work – and it might not just be murder that is the eventual outcome.
The documentary form gives The Appeal real pace and compulsion – I absolutely tore through the book, finishing it in just a couple of days! And whilst I did guess some of the twists and turns (working out the victim and accused murderer was pretty easy), other revelations kept me guessing right up until the very end! Janice Hallett has done a fantastic job of layering various levels of mystery and tension, leaving you as the reader/investigator trying to figure out whether someone’s seemingly innocuous message about staying out late for a few drinks with friends at the golf club is actually a cover for a personal intrigue – or a much darker and sinister deed. Some strands of the case turn out to be false leads and red herrings whilst others, seemingly small at first, morph into larger and more significant events giving the book a real sense of being a case file in progress – and of the reader’s investigations progressing alongside Femi and Charlotte’s.
I can’t say that the characters particularly drew me in to The Appeal – with so many of them it was, at times, easy to forget some of the more peripheral figures and I was very glad that I was reading in paperback so that I could flick back to the list of key players near the front of the book! In this way, The Appeal reminds me of the works of Agatha Christie – her standout characters tend to stick in the mind but many of her novels contain characters that flit around the borders, dropping in with a significant bit of information and then leaving. And, as with Christie’s works, the appeal of The Appeal very much lies in the compulsive plotting and the way in which it plays around with its form and with the reader’s narrative expectations. Brilliant, brilliant stuff.
Which brings me, quite neatly, to the next book I want to review…
Image Description: The cover of Joseph Knox’s True Crime Story shows a greyscale photographic image of a young woman against a backdrop of modern apartments. Her face is largely in shadow so that her features are obscured.
In the early hours of Saturday 17 December 2011, Zoe Nolan, a nineteen-year-old Manchester University student, walked out of a party taking place in the shared accommodation where she had been living for three months.
She was never seen again.
Seven years after her disappearance, struggling writer Evelyn Mitchell finds herself drawn into the mystery. Through interviews with Zoe’s closest friends and family, she begins piecing together what really happened in 2011. But where some versions of events overlap, aligning perfectly with one another, others stand in stark contrast, giving rise to troubling inconsistencies.
Shaken by revelations of Zoe’s secret life, and stalked by a figure from the shadows, Evelyn turns to crime writer Joseph Knox to help make sense of a case where everyone has something to hide.
Zoe Nolan may be missing presumed dead, but her story is only just beginning.
Joseph Knox’s True Crime Story, his first standalone novel following on from his successful Aidan Waits series, delights in experimenting with form, creating a metafictional Manchester in which the writer, Joseph Knox, is both presenting the ‘true crime story’ of the title – an account of the disappearance of young university student Zoe Nolan – and becoming increasingly embroiled both in the mysterious death of the account’s author, Evelyn Mitchell and, possibly, of the case itself.
Told through a series of interviews between Evelyn and Zoe’s closest friends and family, interspersed with emails between Knox and Evelyn about the book, True Crime Story uses its narrative form and structure to not only propel the story and heighten the intrigue – inviting the reader to turn investigator in a similar way to Hallett’s The Appeal – but also to highlight the narrative voices that are missing from the tale.
Because, ultimately, True Crime Story is novel that investigates who gets to tell the stories of missing – and murdered – young women? Who decides whether Zoe Nolan was a dutiful daughter, a gifted musician, a manipulative hussy, an attention-seeker, or a messed up young woman? Could she be all of those things – or none of them? And who decides how Evelyn Mitchell’s work is presented to us, the readers – who has editorial control and what does that lead them to omit? And why?
It’s incredibly cleverly done but not in a pretentious way. As an English Literature student, I delighted in picking apart the metafiction of True Crime Story – and of thinking about the ways in which Knox uses the expectations of narrative, form, and genre to interrogate wider questions about the perception of young women in our society, the portrayal of missing women and girls in media narratives, the control of those narratives, and the rise in ‘true’ crime fiction stories and podcasts. But if all that sounds a bit pretentious, I should stress that I also enjoyed the novel as a reader, appreciating its well-realised characters and setting, interview-like presentation (which reminded me a lot of Six Stories, one of my favourite series of recent years) and compulsive readability.
With a selection of divisive characters – you’ll find yourself both loving and loathing many of them (often at the same time) – and plenty of unexpected twists and revelations, True Crime Story is both a gripping crime novel and a shocking, sometimes chilling, examination of the fate of one young woman – and the implications of her fate for contemporary society.
I can honestly say that both The Appeal and True Crime Story are strong contenders for my Best Books of the Year list. Although different in tone and setting, both of them play with the expectations of the crime genre – and the unique structures through which they present their stories – to heighten the tension and draw the reader into the narrative.
I stormed through both novels, desperate to get back to them whenever forced to tear myself away to attend to real-world life. And, unusually for me and crime fiction, I’ve kept both to read again in the future, sure that I’ll want to go back and unpick some of the clues and revelations through a re-read. Both are highly, highly recommend.
The Appeal by Janice Hallett is published by Viper Books. True Crime Story by Joseph Knox is published by Doubleday. Both books are available now from all good booksellers and online retailers including Hive, Bookshop.org, Waterstones, and Wordery.
Reviews on The Shelf are free, honest, and unbiased and I don’t use affiliate links on my posts. However if you enjoy the blog please consider buying me a coffee on Ko-Fi!
The Shelf of Unread Books 