The Silent Appeal
A Novel
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- Pre-Order
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- Expected Aug 25, 2026
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
From “modern Agatha Christie” (The Sunday Times, London) Janice Hallett, a follow-up to her blockbuster debut novel The Appeal, featuring the Fairway Players as they put on Agatha Christie’s play The Hollow and find themselves embroiled in murder, blackmail, and betrayal once again.
Welcome back to Lower Lockwood. The Fairway Players return with Sarah-Jane and Kevin MacDonald as committee cochairs. This year, they have chosen to stage Agatha Christie’s The Hollow. But auditions aren’t their only problem: Sarah-Jane’s sister, Nicky-Rose, is suddenly back in town under mysterious circumstances, having sold her home in Barbados, left her business providing entertainment on cruise ships, and moved back into their mother Carol’s house.
As always, they’re short on men, and new Player Fran Elroy-Jones enlists a young married couple and the husband’s cousin to join. But no one wants to play the part of the hated Gerda, leaving Kevin and Sarah-Jane with no option but to reach out to an old member they know would be happy to perform in any role.
As with any production, tensions run high, and our intrepid lawyers Femi and Charlotte are tasked with uncovering exactly what happened on the opening night of The Hollow—and whether the correct person has taken the blame.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In Hallett's sly full-length return to the British village of Lower Lockwood (after the novella The Christmas Appeal), rookie attorneys Charlotte Holroyd and Femi Hassan gather evidence for an appeal on behalf of someone accused of another murder connected to the Fairway Players drama society. Digging through a mountain of emails, texts, and online chats to better understand the case, the attorneys piece together the Fairway Players' clashing personalities and petty power struggles—namely the conflict between housewife Sarah-Jane and her sister, Nicky-Rose Dearing, a talented director who abruptly abandoned her career before being welcomed to Lower Lockwood a little too warmly by Sarah-Jane's husband, Kevin MacDonald. As the players mount a production of Agatha Christie's The Hollow, Hallett presents a parade of possible victims and villains (readers don't know who died or who killed them), including recently acquitted murder suspect Issy Beck, lonely workaholic Fran Elroy-Jones, and shady new actor Lucas Stibson. Eventually, egos clash, affairs ramp up, and Charlotte and Femi struggle to separate genuine clues from red herrings. Though Hallett's epistolary structure has lost some of its freshness, she deploys it in service of a mystery as clever as any Dame Agatha ever devised. This will delight the author's fans.
