The Appeal

I read The Appeal by Janice Hallett for a book club with my mom and her friends. The book description says, "The Fairway Players, a local theatre group, is in the midst of rehearsals when tragedy strikes the family of director Martin Hayward and his wife Helen, the play’s star. Their young granddaughter has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and with an experimental treatment costing a tremendous sum, their castmates rally to raise the money to give her a chance at survival. But not everybody is convinced of the experimental treatment’s efficacy—nor of the good intentions of those involved. As tension grows within the community, things come to a shocking head at the explosive dress rehearsal. The next day, a dead body is found, and soon, an arrest is made. In the run-up to the trial, two young lawyers sift through the material—emails, messages, letters—with a growing suspicion that the killer may be hiding in plain sight. The evidence is all there, between the lines, waiting to be uncovered."

This was an engaging book. I started out on audio, but after only a few minutes, I knew I wouldn't be able to follow it, so I switched to reading the hard copy. That was a great call because it was a unique book with lots of different characters and collections of evidence--email and text conversations between different people. I liked being able to look back at the list of characters at the beginning whenever needed. I still got confused at times, but overall it was a fun story that kept me guessing as to who to trust and what was really going on. The characters were fun to get to know and read into (though I don't know that I really particularly liked any of them), and there were some fun twists and turns. There were some weird things--like the two lawyers who are sifting through all this evidence seem to be told what to look for, like someone else already knows the truth, so why are they even doing it? or how people are sending emails to each other instead of texts, which seems kind of unrealistic. But still a fun and engaging read. (Note: There is a little bit of bad language in the book.)

Rating: * * (2/3 = Liked it)