Janice Hallett: The Appeal, Serpent Tail/Viper, 9781788165297

I always check the books listed for the CWA Dagger Awards and came across Janice Hallet's " The Appeal" which won the CWA New Blood Dagger Award 2022 , sounded really interesting

This is certainly a totally unique crime novel in the sense that it is written entirely as a sequence of emails and WhatsApp messages going back and force when law students Charlotte and Femi are assigned to this case by a law firm. In order to uncover what went wrong in the little town of Lower Lockwood and their alpha family the Haywards during a fund raising appeal for their sick grandchild leading eventually to murder,  they have to read previous emails of all the 15 people involved in this plot to get to the bottom of the murderer. 

I really struggled with this concept,  took me quite a while to warm to the concept but it never took. Another problem was that I really did not like any of the characters in the plot and the book has 432 pages! I finished anyway, the second half of the book saw me more engaged but this is definitely not my favourite mystery of the year. Apparently others see this differently which is part of the fun of reading, different strokes for different folks.