Reviews with content warning for Addiction - The Twyford Code

A unique, engaging mystery with a completely unexpected ending that would make a second read through an entirely different experience.

The main character was a highlight of the book; it was refreshing to read from the persepctive of the type of person who doesn't often get to be the main character - older, poor, dyslexic - and he truely felt like a real person. The current plot and past memories were well balanced, and the transcript format of the mystery made for a fun and different read.

I haven't decided if I liked the plot twist at the end, but it was incredibly clever and definitely unexpected, and does want to make me want to reread the book to see how knowing the twist changes the reading experience.

Overall, would highly recommend.

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linguaphile412's review against another edition

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adventurous challenging dark emotional mysterious reflective tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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_inge's review against another edition

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3.0

I really liked The Appeal, so I was keen to read The Twyford Code. Unfortunately it fell a bit flat for me. Where The Appeal uses WhatsApp messages, e-mails, leaflets and all sorts of media to tell the story, The Twyford Code only uses audiofiles. About 100 pages in I wondered if we would get another kind of writing in this book at all, I especially hoped we would get to see the detectives discuss the mystery again. So when I flipped a couple pages and saw I would be reading audio files for the entire novel’s duration, I was quite frustrated. Especially since the way the files were transcribed didn’t make much sense. Initially seeing ‘must have’ translated to ‘mustard’ is quite clever and fun, but after a while it gets old.

What also doesn’t help is that the middle part seems to drag a bit. The segments relating back to the past I especially couldn’t quite care about. I wanted to know what happened in the present, since that was tense and I was curious to see how the story would progress, so at the time it seemed the past was irrelevant to that.

Towards the end there’s suddenly a lot of twists, and the story slowly starts to make more sense. This is when I learned that a lot of the things which bothered me were all there for a reason, and I wished I’d paid closer attention to some of the details.

Hallett has again written a really clever book with a unique way of storytelling. This might mean it’s not always the most easy or enjoyable book to read, but it is very cleverly done and I’m keen to figure out what happened exactly (because I’m still not too sure!).

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