Reviews with content warning for Alcoholism - The Twyford Code

I liked the format of the book. Using transcribed voice recordings and conversations to tell the story was very smart. It was unique and intriguing at the beginning.
But the plot didn't catch me from the beginning. As a result, it was hard to understand what was happening, and when I finally did, I realized that I didn't care about any of the characters enough to find out the truth.
The whole book felt repetitive and disjointed.

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xbernadette's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional mysterious fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? N/A
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

4.0

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mercurialbooks's review against another edition

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adventurous emotional funny mysterious reflective sad tense medium-paced

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

5.0

Thank you to Pigeonhole and Janice Hallett for letting my read this book ahead of its publishing date.

I don't know how to review this. The Twyford Code is excellent.

It is a puzzle within a puzzle and I can see people reading it twice to check through if they missed anything the first time.

I would absolutely say to everyone to make sure you have a physical copy of this book rather than audio or e-book, as flicking back to different pages will be something you want to do.

Essentially, an ex-con (Steve) wants to trace a teacher he once knew in secondary school that disappeared. He doesn't know exactly where to start so he goes back to ask his old school friends. They act shifty around the subject and it leads him to discover The Twyford Code. A code hidden within children's novels written during WWII. This author is no longer enjoyed by modern audiences due to her sexist, racist and elitist writing and is a great pastiche of Enid Blyton. Steve and his friends follow a trail of clues to try to discover what they mean, and how on Earth they are related to the former teacher never coming home. There are a lot of flashbacks to Steve's younger years, including his not so nice family life, so please check content warnings. But the whole thing is tied up with Steve's humorous point of view, he is often unexpectedly funny and quite without meaning to be.

The ending is NOT what you are expecting.

I found reading with Pigeonhole that a few readers dropped out quickly due to the format of the book. It is written as transcriptions of voice recordings. I think this bothered me less as I am not compelled to read each time stamp associated with the paragraph and could skim over them, but some others felt obliged to read them and they found this quite frustrating.

This had the best reveal of any novel I have read in a long time and I genuinely loved it. I'd not read The Appeal (also by Janice Hallett) but now it's all I want to read!

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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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