The Appeal by Janice Hallett (2022) All through our book reviews, we've described suffering through an untold number of books overpraised, overhyped and accompanied by ridiculous glowing blurbs from bestselling authors.....(as in....."I read it one breathless sitting! It'll dazzle you with its clever plotting, stunning twists and sparkling prose!")
We can only assume these authors at least received a fruit basket or a Kindle gift card for agreeing to butter up the back covers of such books with three or four sentence of pure, unadulterated bullshit.......
Having trained ourselves to ignore these little nuggets of nonsense, we still took a chance on "The Appeal".....the set up and plot description hooked us and its epistolary style of telling the story in letters, texts, e-mails and memos further intrigued us.
And halfway into it, we were still on board, thoroughly entertained and eager to see where it was going......until it went way off the rails into excruciating boredom.
This murder mystery's set in a British town whose roost is ruled by Martin and Helen Hayward, a wealthy, charismatic and influential couple who run the community's premier activity, an amateur theater company.
The Haywards couple their latest production of "All My Sons" with a desperate charitable appeal to help fund a hugely expensive cure for their cancer stricken two year old granddaughter. Poppy.
The book's long, long list of characters circle around these twin events like spinning planets.... ......revolving around the play and the appeal.....the endless back and forth e-mails and memos between them reveal their rivalries, agendas, flaws, quirks......and some hidden, deep animosities and any number of dark secrets not yet fully explored.
Yes, the first half of the book held us with its clever witty way of delineating each of these people.....one of whom will end up dead, leaving the rest of them as suspects.
But then the letters and messages become repetitive and even worse....longer and longer. The partially revealed backstories and clues overlap each other into total confusion as to what's really going on......and the book waits an eternity to finally kill somebody.
The appearance of a murder victim, sends the book into a series of sleep-inducing letters between two lawyers who've been tasked with penetrating the mystery of who did what to whom......and why.
So we found the last half of "The Appeal" both confounding and dare we way it, uninteresting. By the time its lurches into its last 50 pages, it felt like plowing through some impenetrable college textbook we'd endured back in college.....pages and pages of dry-as-dust breakdowns of possible suspects and motives that brought us close to the edge of giving up on it.
By the time the book's finally ready to fully explain its mysteries, we could only breathe a sigh of relief that it was over.......(a damn shame too, since the ultimate reveals turn out worthy enough - sad, disturbing, even monstrous......but they're buried under a mountain of boring verbiage....)
1 star (*) for the book's first half......the rest it? To hell with blurbers......it's a dull dull read and not worth the time spent on it.
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