THE TWYFORD CODE

Through a series of audio recordings, a former felon recounts his attempts to solve a literary code that may lead to stolen gold…or maybe that's all a red herring.

The novel begins with a letter written in 2021 from a police inspector to a professor, asking him to listen to a set of audio files that were found on an iPhone belonging to a man who's gone missing. What follows is a novel made up almost entirely of recordings and letters: recordings created by Steven Smith, who has recently been released from prison, wishes to connect with a son he never knew he had, and is haunted by a strange experience from his childhood that he only semi-remembers; and letters shared between Inspector Waliso and professor Mansfield in response to them. When Steven was a child, his teacher read the class a book by an author named Edith Twyford and then took them on a field trip that seems to have ended in tragedy. Trying to figure out what happened that day, he reaches out to the other children who were there and discovers that each of them has become fascinated with the “Twyford Code” that the author seems to have threaded through her novels. Twyford may have been a secret British agent during World War II involved in Operation Fish, a secret mission to move all of Britain’s gold stores to Canada for safekeeping. As he is drawn deeper into the intrigue of the code, Steven also records the story of his life—the deaths of his parents, his rough upbringing, and how he fell in with a family of criminals and eventually went to prison for theft. In a book with this many twists and turns, of course, there’s no way of knowing what's true and what's not, and Hallett continues to pull the rug out from under the reader every time we think we understand what's going on. The good: It’s complicated, in the best way, and the reveals over the last section of the book are truly gaspworthy. The bad: The recording gimmick does begin to feel a bit gimmicky, and this structure makes up 90% of the novel.

Code lovers rejoice! This one’s for you.