Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Appeal | 2021 | Janice Hallett | Buy |
| 2 | The Christmas Appeal | 2023 | Janice Hallett | Buy |
| 3 | The Silent Appeal | 2026 | Janice Hallett | Buy |
The Appeal began with Janice Hallett’s debut in 2021, which took the Fairway Players, an amateur theatre company preparing a production of All My Sons, and told their story entirely through an email chain. Two law students read the emails after the fact, aware that something criminal happened during the production, trying to work out what. The format is deceptively simple: emails between people who are being polite or evasive or performing emotions they do not feel, and the reader has to read between the lines of every message. The book won the CWA New Blood Dagger in 2022.
The Christmas Appeal (2023) returned the Fairway Players for a shorter, festive caper. The group is rehearsing a pantomime of Jack and the Beanstalk to raise money for a new church roof, and there is, of course, a dead body. The novella keeps the same ensemble feel and the same format as the original, and it works as a light companion volume for readers who want more time with the characters without the full weight of the debut.
The Silent Appeal, published in 2026, brings back the full theatre group for a new production: Agatha Christie’s The Hollow. The series as a whole has a particular quality: the comedy of watching people be petty in emails, the discomfort of realizing that same pettiness conceals something much worse.