Janice Hallett’s The Silent Appeal

With thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.

Janice Hallett’s The Silent Appeal is due out in late August in Canada and the U.S., and in early September in the UK (which is, itself, a bit of a mystery for a new British crime novel: it’s more common for the North American publication dates to lag behind).

The Fairway Players, the community theatre group that starred in Hallett’s début novel, The Appeal, is back and putting on another show. Conflicts abound, keeping the characters equally busy off stage.

In The Appeal, two young lawyers, Charlotte and Fermi, were tasked by their senior with untangling a series of unfortunate events, including larceny. Here, the action kicks off with the two (now more experienced) lawyers reunited to re-examine a murder. Their now-retired senior’s former client confessed to the crime, but there’s some doubt about whether the full story came out.

A lot has happened since our last glimpse at the village of Lower Lockwood.

The events of the previous novel have shifted the troupe’s dynamics and consigned a handful of former stars to a range of fates.

And there’s a provocative newcomer: Nicky-Rose, Sarah-Jane’s younger sister, is a gifted dancer who departed at eighteen for Juilliard and has spent most of the last two decades largely incommunicado. A series of acrimonious email exchanges suggest that Nicky-Rose parted ways with her long-time business partner in Barbados in a painful–and possibly bloody-manner.

Sarah and her husband, Kevin are producing and directing, respectively, Agatha Christie’s The Hollow. It’s a perfect am dram production: there are a number of meaty roles, and the female characters outnumber the male ones.

Famously, Christie (dissatisfied with her original novel version) re-wrote the work as a play and cut out Hercule Poirot’s role.

It’s a poignant story: Gerda, a put-upon frump will do everything in her power to prevent her arrogant husband, a doctor, from leaving her. She’s weathered his previous infidelities, but during a country weekend party, the husband encounters the glamorous Hollywood actress who was once the love of his life. And now (which is a bit baffling) she wants him back.

Parallel dynamics are playing out in complicated ways off-stage. Through the emails, readers eventually realize how many of the cast members are concealing intimate and potentially dangerous secrets.

One of the most consistently annoying characters in the first novel, Issy, is rendered more poignant here. Her desperate need for love and attention making her a valuable ally for Nicky-Rose, but while Izzy is earnestly beading friendship bracelets, Nicky-Rose is setting Izzy up as a dupe.

Meanwhile, Sarah’s stuck at home with the baby during rehearsals, after both her mother and teenage son decline to provide childcare. Worse, her mother has signed on with a competing community theatre company that has the same performance week schedule.

Fortunately, Kevin acquires the able assistance of Nicky-Rose. With her professional experience, he’s hoping for an award in an amateur theatre competition. The judge will be in attendance on opening night, so nothing can be permitted to go wrong. But maybe Kevin and Nicky-Rose are becoming a bit too close?

Hallett’s furious exchange of texts and emails between the characters is a narrative method that fosters a lot of humour and irony.

But in this outing, I found that the recurring interjections by the young lawyers, who mull over each sheaf of documents conveyed to them, served mostly to repeat rather than advance the action. I found myself skipping over them after the first few.

The plot lagged at certain points, but this is a fun and inventive mystery novel, and it has a few nice twists and some poignant moments.