APPEAL.

A senior partner at a London law firm hands two trainee lawyers, Femi Hassan and Charlotte Holroyd, a stack of emails, texts and letters. He asks them to work out the truth behind a case he will not summarize for them. The documents trace an amateur drama society in the English village of Lockwood as it rehearses its latest production.

When the director's young granddaughter is diagnosed with a rare cancer, the company rallies to fund an experimental treatment abroad. A newly arrived member, a nurse who joined the group to help with the fundraising, becomes central to what follows. The correspondence builds toward a death, and toward a conviction the two trainees have quietly been asked to test.

The book is epistolary throughout: no narrator, only the messages themselves. Femi and Charlotte's own exchanges are threaded in as they trade theories and flag contradictions. It reads as a puzzle to be assembled rather than a story to be told, closer in spirit to a locked-room mystery than a conventional thriller.

It was Janice Hallett's first novel, and it won the Crime Writers' Association's New Blood Dagger.