Throughout the Fairway Players' staging of All My Sons and the charity appeal for little Poppy Reswick's life-saving medical treatment, the murderer hid in plain sight. I know Hallett has found lots of success with this book and clearly she has a mind for intricate plotting, but this one simply wasn't appeal-ing (sorry, I had to do it) to me. Unlike classic murder mysteries, there was no way that the readers could have pieced together the clues to solve it themselves. In keeping with the moral ambiguity raised elsewhere in the text the ending is engaging in the way it does and does not parcel out justice. Just as rehearsals are getting underway, however, Poppy Haywood, the director’s two year old niece, is diagnosed with a rare—and near always fatal—form of cancer.

A group of caregivers and Thespians rally around a young child diagnosed with cancer by raising money for treatment that is costly and currently unavailable, except in America. We have everything from sucking up to back stabbing, from lies to fantasising, from nefarious deeds to cover ups and it’s left to the reader to spot the many red flags those involved raise via their words. Someone has been murdered and the powers that be need to be certain that the one who is in jail is the person who should be there.One character which stood out for me was Issy, who enters the novel as a modern-day Miss Bates (see Jane Austen’s Emma (1815)) and yet her ultimate role in the tale becomes far more complex and insidious. Cleverly constructed - because it is not only about what is being said, but also about what is not being said - it is peopled with characters who are both believable and relatable, including a murderer hidden in plain sight.

The format of The Appeal won't be for everyone and at first I felt overwhelmed with the large cast of characters. As the reader races through the book, an accumulation effect occurs, with various strands of the narrative emerging. To me, the format brings the mystery much closer to a form of true crime, but without the guilt of having a good time at the expense of real life victims.

Though it wasn’t difficult to figure out who the culprit could be, some of the facts revealed in the process came as a surprise. Their two year old granddaughter, Poppy Reswick has been diagnosed with Medulloblastoma-a rare form of brain cancer. Or to use a simile, the threads of this story are like a lot of cars all racing towards a central collision point and you don’t know what the fall out will be, who will survive the wreckage.