Tag: Janice Hallett

Review 2076: The Twyford Code

~ whatmeread ~ 2 Comments

I know she is very popular, but I’m proving not to be a Janice Hallett fan. I almost finished her first book despite having serious problems with it, but unfortunately I had already purchased this one, because it was so popular, before I read that one. I quit reading The Twyford Code at about the 200-page point because it seemed rambling and pointless.

Steve Smith is a middle-aged ex-con who is determined to go straight. One day something reminds him of a day in school when his teacher took his class on a field trip because of an old children’s adventure story he found on a bus. Steve can’t remember that day very well, but he knows they went to Bournemouth to visit the home of the author, Edith Twyford, and he thinks that their teacher, Miss Isles, never returned from the trip. He decides to find out what happened to Miss Isles.

Steve doesn’t know that there is a whole internet culture around Twyford’s works, and people using them to search for treasure. He tries to get his old schoolmates to help, but they are not reliable for one reason or another. However, a librarian named Lucy is ready to help.

The entire novel is supposedly transcriptions of audio files Steve made on his phone, because the mission stated at the beginning of the novel is to figure out who he is (which would seem simple, but like the mission in the other Hallett novel, unlikely). I got a little tired of the misspellings this approach leads to as well as the rambling narration. The mystery seems to consist of word puzzles, and I wasn’t interested in solving them. I’m sure the book also includes a long and laborious explanation of the clues, which I’m not interested in reading. Finally, there is so much extra information thrown in that no one would be able to guess what is a clue and what isn’t. Hallett’s books seem to me to just throw in the kitchen sink in a very disorganized fashion and let the reader deal with it.

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Review 2035: The Appeal

~ whatmeread ~ 6 Comments

Janice Hallett, and others obviously, thought she was being original when she decided to write a murder mystery entirely in texts, emails, and documents. Maybe she was, but it seems she couldn’t have chosen a more cumbersome way to convey her story. At almost 450 pages, the novel has about 200 pages of plot, and no one is killed until 100 pages from the end.

Further, Hallett cheats by leaving out some of the correspondence until the end. But my biggest problem with the novel is the complete lack of plausibility of the situation. A professor gives two students the task of analyzing the case, but he is hiding information from them and asking them questions he already knows the answer to, not asking them to find evidence of who really is the murderer. I wonder what kind of class the author could have been envisioning.

The plot is this: an amateur theater company is putting on a play. However, the usual director, Martin Hayward, asks his son James to take over because his granddaughter Poppy has cancer, and he is involved in fund raising to pay for an experimental treatment.

Two newcomers to town, Kal and Sam Greenwood, try out for parts in the play at the urging of Isabel Beck, a clingy girl who is Sam’s coworker and new bestie. But there is something unexplained about the Greenwoods, who have just returned from working as aid workers in Africa. Sam also seems hostile to Tish Bhatoa, the doctor who is arranging Poppy’s treatment.

One side-effect of its approach is that the novel also contains about 100 pages of exposition of the murder, which bogs things down so much that, unbelievably, I finally gave up on it less then 50 pages from the end because I couldn’t take it anymore.

What is most unlikely, though, is the role of the police. There isn’t one! There are two minor events involving the police, but their reports are so amateurish as to be unbelievable. What kind of police report takes down testimony without bothering to take the name of the witness?

Then, finally, the victim is killed. Hallett withholds the victim’s name, and in fact one of the puzzles set by the professor is to figure out who is killed! What nonsense! After the murder, there is no evidence of a police investigation except the documents, and lots of questions are unanswered that the police would have to investigate.

A great deal is made of the status of the characters in terms of class. I didn’t understand things this way at all. For example, one student states that no one listens to Isabel because she is low status. No one listens to her because she’s silly!

Finally, the theory of murder is presented, as far as I could tell, with absolutely no proof. I say “as far as I could tell” because I finally stopped reading. What balderdash! I can’t believe this book was so popular.

This year I forgot about Readers Imbibing Peril for September, but I have some nice chilling books coming up!

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