The Appeal by Janice Hallett
Thank you for joining me this week for Book Beginnings on Fridays where participants share the opening sentence (or two) from the book they are reading. You can also share from a book you want to feature, even if you are not reading it at the moment.
MY BOOK BEGINNING
Dear both,
As discussed, it is best you know nothing before you read the enclosed.
-- from The Appeal by Janice Hallett. This epistolatory crime novel is told entirely through correspondence. Because it is a 21st Century novel, the correspondence is almost entirely emails and text messages. Have you read it?
I read the sequel, The Christmas Appeal, in December and enjoyed it so much I wanted to go back and read the original. The Christmas version was much shorter, a novella of 208 pages. This one feels way, way, longer to me. I'm halfway through and, while it is lively and entertaining, the email/text thing is losing its allure. We haven't even come to a dead body yet!
YOUR BOOK BEGINNING
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Hi SJ, sorry to bother you, but Sam and I are talking about seating arrangements for Poppy's Ball. Please, please, please, can we be seated together?
The Fairway Players, a local theatre group, is in the midst of rehearsals when tragedy strikes the family of director Martin Hayward and his wife Helen, the play’s star. Their young granddaughter has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer, and with an experimental treatment costing a tremendous sum, their castmates rally to raise the money to give her a chance at survival.
But not everybody is convinced of the experimental treatment’s efficacy—nor of the good intentions of those involved. As tension grows within the community, things come to a shocking head at the explosive dress rehearsal. The next day, a dead body is found, and soon, an arrest is made. In the run-up to the trial, two young lawyers sift through the material—emails, messages, letters—with a growing suspicion that the killer may be hiding in plain sight. The evidence is all there, between the lines, waiting to be uncovered.
