The Appeal by Janice Hallett - SPOILERS

[littlescratch]

Just finished reading this. I absolutely raced through the first two thirds, and was totally drawn in by all the different characters. However for me, it fell apart slightly after that. Pages of texts between the law students (are they trainees or law students? Who knows) setting out all their different theories and hypotheses, it really broke the flow for me and I lost track. Also, the "who was killed" and "who is in prison" was relayed second hand, which was a bit of a letdown and took the impact out of it. By the time I reached the end, I couldn't really remember everything from the correspondence and the big "reveal" felt a bit flat.

It has had loads of brilliant reviews, so maybe I'm wrong. I think it didn't help that I was reading it on Kindle - it would have been good to be able to flip back and re-read certain parts. The characterisation was brilliant, and I had a really strong mental image of all the people and their surroundings, even though none of that was explicitly described. I also didn't have a problem with keeping track of who was who, because the characters were all very vivid to me. It was just the last part that undermined it, I thought. Be interested to know what others think.

I've just finished reading it and was let down by the ending. It felt rushed and fell flat. The QC character, Tanner, just seemed to disappear, and never reappeared to confirm that the students had arrived at the same conclusion as he had.

I raced through it and liked it a lot, but I did find the law student framing really annoying and contrived:

• The constant notes from them 'oooh did you spot that thing that x said, nudge nudge' spelling out the clues for the reader.
• The summary files, as you say, are just an irritating way of summarising what we already know and don't add anything. It's like the author doesn't trust you to follow anything.
• The idea is supposed to be that Tanner is getting them to read the emails so that he can see whether they come to the same conclusion he does without bias. He then drip feeds other emails and bits of evidence that he's withheld until it suited him, so they don't actually come to the same conclusion independently at all, he directly feeds it to them?
• The ending falls flat because it doesn't actually involve any evidence? A load of people have read some emails and decided on a theory of what happened, exactly like all the other possible theories in the files, but there's no actual evidence for it? Like, neat theory, not enough to put someone in prison.