You have a key that opens a safe deposit box. Inside is a bundle of documents … You must read it and make a decision.” So begins Janice Hallett’s third novel, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels. As will be apparent to readers of her previous books, The Appeal and The Twyford Code, we are in familiar territory. Will this be a carefully curated dossier, involving multiple voices, some of them intriguingly unreliable? Will there be emails, text exchanges, news clippings, pages from screenplays? And, most importantly, will there be a dense mystery that will be satisfyingly solved by sheer authorial ingenuity in the last 50 pages? In that case, please toss another log on the fire.
The mystery concerns a long-ago triple suicide in a London cult, involving a leader self-styled as the Angel Gabriel. Amanda Bailey, a terrier-like true-crime author, is determined to dig up the truth as quickly as possible, because she’s on a deadline. Lying to people is second nature to Amanda (“No, I’m not recording this”), as is the naked exploitation of every acquaintance and contact. Enjoyably complicating Amanda’s sections is a second voice, that of her empathic assistant Ellie Cooper, who transcribes interviews and adds comments. In Ellie’s seemingly superfluous asides – which naturally repay attention – there are echoes of The Appeal’s wonderful central creation, the slippery Isabel Beck.
