The Christmas Appeal - Janice Hallett ****

By Brian Clegg

Janice Hallett has rapidly become the best active light crime writer, bettering her first two books with the outstanding The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, so I rushed to purchase her latest, a Christmas sequel to her remarkable debut The Appeal. Written in her distinctive modern epistolary style – in this case primarily featuring emails and WhatsApp messages, it is an entertaining piece of fluff, but not up to the usual standard.

Let’s get the good part in first. The storyline features a pantomime, and there is a particularly strong thread of humour here – more so than usual in her books. Christmas always makes a great setting for a cosy mystery, and this comes across nicely here. There was one point (featuring a dog and a bone) when I laughed out loud and plenty more to smile at. As always, Hallett manages brilliantly at using the apparently distancing style of collecting written communications to really get us into the heads of the characters and to keep track of a tangled plot.

The downside, though, that does make this feel a little rushed as a book (it’s also more novella than novel) is that the plot itself lacks the wow factor that the previous books have provided. When all is revealed, it’s a bit ‘Okay, fine. So that’s what happened,’ but it’s hard to get engrossed in it. I’d also say that a sub-plot where an order for wrapped sweets to give out after the production goes horribly wrong was just too farcical, even for a pantomime, let alone a crime novel.

All in all, by far Hallett’s weakest outing. Yet she is so good that it still beats a fair number of the Christmas mysteries that will be new on the shelves this year.

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.