A review by booksjessreads
The Appeal by Janice Hallett

mysterious tense fast-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

I absolutely sailed through this due to its faced-paced nature and I have never seen a book written in this way before. It was really interesting to have a mystery to solve yourself without the flowery prose of scenes and detectives getting in the way. It was really engaging to have you yourself being at the centre of solving the crime. 

When I bought this book, I expected it to be <i>purely</i> emails, texts etc. with a page at the end telling you if you got it right, but this is not what you get. Emails and texts make a large chunk of it, but you do actually see the correspondence of the people trying to solve the crime alongside you and their texts to one another summarise the events that have just happened, as well as posing questions that help you along the way. You are not completely left to your own devices. It is really interesting to see their thought processes alongside your own. 

Each group of characters has their own subplot going on, and they all intermingle in their own way. In the beginning it was quite hard to piece together who was who and what subplot belonged to which family/set of relations. However, when you become engrossed in the book it completely encapsulates you and it does start to make sense. I think this is what knocked me from giving it 5 stars - there were too many characters in it for me. However, I think this in itself was carried off so well and so realistic because real-life crimes involve a lot of people in the periphery and so despite this, it was so cleverly done. 
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