THE APPEAL

The members of a drama club come together in the face of tragedy, unaware they could be the victims of an ongoing fraud.

The Fairway Players are a close-knit drama group in a small town outside London, socially centered around the club's founders, the Haywards and their children. Plans for their upcoming production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons are upended when Martin Hayward, the patriarch of the family and leader of the drama group, announces that his 2-year-old granddaughter, Poppy, has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer. An experimental treatment from the U.S. has shown promise but requires the family to raise $350,000. The Fairway Players immediately begin fundraising, but as the money comes in, it seems that the Haywards might be using it for costs unassociated with Poppy's care. At the same time, the Haywards' doctor, Tish Bhatoa, is applying more and more pressure on the family, demanding high payments into her own personal account, which she claims to be using to pay for the medicine from the U.S. A new member of the Fairway Players with a personal history with Tish starts asking questions—about Poppy's condition, the Haywards' past, and Tish's intentions—that could threaten the entire operation, be it real or fraudulent. None of this, however, is told in narrative form. Instead, Hallett introduces the story via Femi and Charlotte, two law students who are reviewing all the case documentation ahead of an appeal in what became a murder case. Emails, newspaper clippings, text exchanges, and handwritten notes are used to lay out the communications between the people in the case, and some characters are only seen through mentions in the emails and texts of others. Femi and Charlotte act as guides for the reader, checking in and sorting through what has taken place every so often. The result is a confusing mix of overlapping half conversations and unconvincing synthesis that attempts to tie together too many threads rather than an engaging mystery.

A lack of clear and consistent narration means the story gets lost in this overstuffed mystery.