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A review by _inge
The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett
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!).
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!).
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death
Moderate: War
Minor: Addiction, Alcoholism, Gun violence, Mental illness, and Alcohol