Janice Hallett books

Anthologies

Short Stories/Novellas

Standalone Novels

The Appeal Reading Order

Janice Hallett worked as a magazine editor, a journalist, and a communications writer for the Cabinet Office, Home Office, and Department for International Development before turning to fiction. She also wrote a feminist Shakespearean stage comedy called NetherBard and co-wrote the feature film Retreat. By the time she published her debut novel The Appeal in 2021, she had a professional background in exactly the kind of institutional communication that her fiction turns into murder mysteries.

The epistolary format is consistent across her work, though she varies what documents she uses. The Appeal unfolds through emails among an amateur theatre group. The Twyford Code works through voice recordings. The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels uses emails, WhatsApp messages, and interview transcripts. The Examiner runs through the digital platform of an art school, accessed by an external examiner reviewing students’ work. Each novel makes the form itself part of the puzzle, asking readers to think about what these documents reveal and what the people writing them are choosing to hide.

She has also written for younger readers: A Box Full of Murders (2025) is her first children’s novel, aimed at readers aged 8-12 and using the same found-document approach. Her Appeal series continued with The Christmas Appeal in 2023 and The Silent Appeal in 2026. Hallett writes quickly and her books have found a consistent readership among people who like their mysteries to have a formal conceit and a slow creep of unease as you realize what the documents add up to.