Long-held grudges, jealousies, resentments, lies, secrets, obsessive behaviour and deceptions surface among the participants. I’m going to try to keep reading and reviewing, but I will probably have to step back quite a bit from the commenting/social aspect of the site. The format of The Appeal won't be for everyone and at first I felt overwhelmed with the large cast of characters.

I will admit I have never been good with a story that has a multitude of characters and this book was no exception.I think the author handles this aspect of the book effectively, as I felt in a short space of time several distinct voices emerge, even if they only contribute a small occasional message or two. Later he shares correspondence and other documents pertaining to the case based on which Femi and Charlotte chalk out and analyze probable scenarios that could have possibly led to the murder.

Now the reading tastes of these four when it comes to mystery novels is by no means similar, so in my thinking if four very different readers enjoyed it, then maybe, just maybe, I would too. Soon “the appeal” is underway – play performances, sponsoring running events, raffle tickets, and a whole host of ways to raise money to pay for this drug. There is little or no breathing space as every page contains relevant information and demands the reader's full attention. The story starts with two young law students Charlotte and Femi, who have been assigned a case by QC Roderick Tanner.Olufemi (Femi) Hassan and Charlotte Holroyd are tasked by their boss QC Roderick Tanner to sift through the correspondence of a number of people to try to prove a convicted client innocent of murder. As the story progresses we see doubt and suspicion directed towards the legitimacy of the appeal , the treatment options and the healthcare professionals involved and members of the “alpha” family.

Matters are thrown into disarray when young Poppy is diagnosed with a brain tumour, which leads to crowdfunding efforts and a campaign to raise funds, an appeal for lifesaving experimental drugs from the United States, with the support of Clinical Consultant Oncologist, Dr Tish Bhatoa. These elements made my reading experiences frustrating to the point where I stopped caring about who was whom, and all that I was reading for was the reveal of the murderer. The broad ranging plot takes us far and wide and into a number of areas which initially seems daunting in scale. Set in a small town in England, the leading and most influential figures are Martin and Helen Haywood. We use Google Analytics to see what pages are most visited, and where in the world visitors are visiting from.

They are kept in the dark initially as to the true nature of the case and it is best that readers go in without all of the details as well.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. I don’t always do this as sometimes they reveal a bit too much about the plot, but on this occasion I think the blurb is a good thing to read first, since it provides a useful context for the role of the framing narrative involving Femi and Charlotte. Letters also form a third of the narrative in Macdonald’s The Crime Conductor (1931) and there are the crime dossiers constructed by Dennis Wheatley. It’s getting harder and harder to find a crime novel which is not only original, but cleverly plotted, with a very unique twist.The whole book is ‘clever’ like a magician’s trick is clever - there’s a lot of misdirection and “look over there”. Photograph: Karen Robinson/The Observer View image in fullscreen ‘I never plan a thing in advance – it takes the joy out of it’: Janice Hallett. The community's everyday life is disrupted by the frenzied effort to raise an ever-increasing total of money. The group bands together to form an Appeal, designed to raise the funds necessary to PROcure the cure.