Janice Hallett topped charts last year with her debut, The Appeal, a thriller about a murder in the sleepy town of Lower Lockwood told entirely in a mix of texts, emails and documents. Hallett’s second novel, The Twyford Code, is innovative in a different way: it is a transcription of 200 audio files that have been found on the iPhone 4 of missing ex-convict Steven Smith.
Steven, the reader discovers, has recently been released after more than a decade in prison. Rejected by the son who never knew him, lonely and at a loose end, he becomes increasingly obsessed with how his former teacher Miss Iles vanished while on a class field trip 40 years earlier and decides to investigate. The audio files are his record of the inquiry, as he looks up the former friends who were with him on that long-ago outing to the coast and digs into Miss Iles’s own obsessions. She believed that Edith Twyford, a “twee and much-maligned children’s author” who is a shameless (and brilliant) pastiche of Enid Blyton, put coded secrets in her books during the second world war, and was investigating this when she disappeared. Steven becomes equally fixated, working with a helpful librarian, Lucy, to decipher a code in Twyford’s books, which he comes to believe will lead to hidden treasure.
