This is not a bad story, and I don’t want my rating to suggest that, but I really disliked the format. It made it incredibly difficult for me to feel invested in what was happening. I am not particularly a fan of stories told through emails, texts, interviews, etc., and I hadn’t realized that’s what this would be initially. I was simply attracted to the cult aspect, and the general mystery was incredibly alluring.

Aside from disliking the format, I found the petty dynamic between Oliver and Amanda quite annoying. This only further pulled me out of the story.

But…

The unraveling here was quite intriguing. I’ve no problem acknowledging that Hallett worked out a rather complex situation in a completely unpredictable way.

I stuck with this on my second try solely because I am committed to truly catching up on my NetGalley reads, with the hope of progressing toward a 90% or higher feedback score - a goal I’d like to meet by next summer. Otherwise, I would have kicked this to the curb, simply because my mind doesn’t adjust well to this type of storytelling. Janice Hallett is clearly a smart lady. As long as this isn’t how she always lets her tales unfold, I’d be happy to try another one of her books one day.

I am immensely grateful to Atria Books and NetGalley for my copy. All opinions are my own.

This was a five star read for me. I became very obsessive about it. I wanted to read it every single moment. I had it on my Kindle and I had it in print. And I would say that’s probably the only two ways I would read it. There’s so much in this mixed media format that I would find difficult on audio. So print and Kendall.

I like this one more because it seems to me that she got even better with this format that she has really done better than anyone else. As you know, her books are completely mixed media. There is literally no regular pros. It’s all text messages and transcriptions of conversations Articles and pieces of novels newspapers even screenplay. Whatever comes into play in the case itself. She’s gotten very very good at maintaining the flow of the story within the bounce of this particular construction. And this is not easy to do. She’s playing it a very high-level Here.

I think also I like this one more because the steaks were a lot higher. In the appeal there was a crime and even a murder but nothing near this book. In the Alton Angels case we touch on brutal murder, kidnapping, colt and psychology. All kinds of things that are very high stakes. And it’s handled really well Because our main character, Amanda Bailey, is a smart and responsible journalist. She set out to find the truth and she is absolutely dogging about getting there one piece of the story that I didn’t expect to be as fascinated by as I was is especially in the first third of the book, where we really see her digging into things and making something out of kind of a bunch of nothing. At the start, there’s really not a lot to go on, but she Just grabs at the smallest thread and pretty soon you start seeing things begin to unravel. It’s a long book. Over 420 pages. But it absolutely flew by.

Janice Hallett let you play along and if you’ve listened to our show for any amount of time you know that that’s one of my favorite things. There are a lot of people who are using the great Dame Agatha Christie as their inspiration for novels as they write in the 2020s, I honestly believe that of all of them Agatha Christie is very favorite would be Janice Hallett. I know she’s mine.

I really enjoyed The Appeal, but I can’t make it through this one. I’m not planning on giving up on Janice Hallett, but The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels is plodding along too slowly for me and not revealing enough information to keep me coming back to it.

I love Janice Hallett and the way she can make me feel like a detective solving a mystery! She's truly talented and I recommend her to everyone I know. If you haven't read her yet-- you are missing out! This was my second favorite of hers, after The Appeal.

Amanda is a journalist who begins researching for a new book about a cult-related cold case that took place 18 years prior. Told in multiple forms of media such as interviews and text messages, readers are pulled along for the ride as she begins to uncover strange anomalies that hint at supernatural powers at work.

When people around the case seem to be dropping like flies, Amanda races to find answers before someone else does.

This book was compelling, dark, and exactly the thing I needed to get me out of a reading slump. I would love to read more from this author!

(Thanks to the publisher for an ARC of this book in exchange for my honest review.)

I love these books. They require so much brain power, so don’t read them distracted, but they are so fun. It’s such an interesting set up to have the book be fully emails, memos, etc. It’s fun to try and piece the story together and figure out the mystery. I adore these books and can’t wait for more!

A dark and twisty book with lots of a-ha moments.
The truth they uncovered from the long ago case was absolutely shocking!
Great book overall

Once again, Janice Hallett's unique "found footage" style of writing completely captivated me! Loved this twisty true crime investigation told mainly through recordings and correspondence, about what happened with a mysterious cult 18 years ago and what happened to the baby that survived. Things grow increasingly tense and dangerous as things progress, and I wasn't in love with the way things ended, but overall I enjoyed this story very much.

This was good! The twists and turns were great - and it’s a nice change of pace to read a mystery in an epistolary format. This one uses WhatsApp, parts of novels, emails and a screenplay. I recommend reading instead of listening because there is a lot to track.

Thank you to NetGalley and Viper for an advanced reader copy in exchange for an honest review.

I love Hallett's style of writing, where she plays with all different communication methods in the text of the story. It feels like the reader is snooping into other people's business. I enjoyed this book but it wasn't my favorite. Either way, it was still a fun and enjoyable read. I would recommend Janice Hallett to anyone who loves a fast paced mystery playing out before them.
#TheMysteriousCaseoftheAlpertonAngels #Netgalley #Atria

“But just because someone is a born leader, doesn’t mean you should follow them.”

I love when stories are told as a collection of documents.
I honestly don't think I saw where this story was going at any point. I was pulled into this case by Amanda, and there were several moments where I was alongside Ellie as she was worrying about the rabbit hole Oliver was going down. I think this story also has a lot to say about the ethics of true crime and boiling down somebody's tragedy into something with a "new angle" or "fresh twist" to make it into a beach read. Amanda and Oliver never truly cared about the people affected by the Alperton Angels - they cared about getting their hands on the story and furthering their careers, and this made me reflect a lot on the relationship that I had with true crime years ago and the relationship that I have with it now. The part where Amanda said that calling him "Jonah" might trigger him but "at least it would get a response" was horrific to me.
I'm still not sure how I feel about the ending. The reasoning behind Amanda's actions didn't feel like they had a lot of build up to them. Maybe if she had revealed more in her conversations with Oliver and Ellie, it wouldn't have felt so rushed to me. I did enjoy seeing the role Ellie had in the story gradually get larger though.

✨more like 3.5 stars but rounding up to a 4 because I gave The Appeal by the same author a 3 star and I enjoyed that wayyyy less than this one!

✨hallett’s books are so easy to read and put down and pick up whenever you have a couple minutes. the way they’re formatted you could read for 30 mins at a time and get through a great chunk of the book.

✨I enjoyed this mystery a lot and was on my toes until the very end. there were multitudes of twists and I thought how the book ended was great. highly recommend picking this one up if you’re thinking about reading a book from this author!

Janice Hallett books are hit or miss for me, and this one was a miss. The story felt a little disjointed and I struggled to connect to the characters and story. I did not finish at 35%

Thank you for the advance copy of this book!

It's very hard for me to get into and read books written the way Janice Hallett writes them. For someone who has to communicate a lot (using a lot of different methods) for work, it can subconsciously feel like work to read a book that is structured as if it is a series of work communications. So trying to unwind from work by reading a collection of other people's work communications can be difficult. It is a testament to Hallett's storycrafting that it feels worth pushing through when it's not something I'm doing for a job or something I even have to do. When the story shifted to showing us the unproduced film script, it felt immediately more engaging to me.


A particularly odd quirk of the format is that people don't normally text or email descriptions of their own or other people's appearances, like we would get in a traditionally presented novel. So the characters have to take shape in the readers' own heads. I did not recognize this until later in the book, when I realized I had a few characters confused for other characters, because I mostly only had names to go on, which I assumed I'd straighten out later. I'm sure the "Interview Wish List" was included for this purpose, much like the cast list of the theatre production in The Appeal.


This format is unique and cool in many ways. It makes you feel like the "curator" of the collection did a fantastic job organizing everything they've found in order to preserve several "reveals" to the reader until points where they would have maximum impact. And it's all just things Hallett wrote specifically to be that way. Brilliant stuff. I particularly enjoyed that several passages were transcribed recorded conversations or interviews including the main protagonist and then we saw her transcriber talk to her about them, giving us a debrief of sorts on the recorded events and the main character's thoughts on them.


Moving on to the content: this book focuses on a cold case involving a cult. I'm in. We follow an impassioned writer who is investigating events from 18 years prior and has to communicate a lot with people who were around at the time, which lends itself really well to this format. The turns the story goes on were creative and engrossing. The reveal of what actually happened all those years ago was extremely compelling, and the moment of realization that our protagonist already had documentation that revealed the true events of that night was thrilling. 


I did not expect the present day twists the case took and what happened to our main characters, but thought they were a great, satisfying end to the story.


The dedication at the end shocked me to tears.

I love love love books in epistolary and this was no exception! There is just something so fun about digging through emails, texts, transcripts etc that makes the story so much more real! And what a fantastic read! A few disturbing bits and a lot of excitement that kept me glued to the final page!

Highly recommend this book. I love how Hallett writes using texts and emails and it keeps the story moving quickly. I couldn't put it down and she is an auto read author for me!

When I read the description for this I was a little bit weary because this isn't really my favorite type of mystery or thriller. However, when I saw that there was a cult aspect, I was intrigued. The first half of the book really had me hooked and I was surprised by how much I was enjoying it. However, the second half was pretty lackluster and kind of lost me. I did enjoy the ending and liked all the explanation but didn't think it was evenly paced with the first half of the book. Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for this advanced copy in exchange for an honest review.

At first I was enjoying this book. Then the plot got confusing and the book dragged on. I got an advanced readers copy from netgalley but my review is unbiased. I really enjoyed “the Christmas Appeal” and am disappointed in this book. I will still read other books of hers.

I received a complimentary copy of this book "The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels" and all opinions expressed are my own. This book sounded interesting. I couldn't get pass the format to read it. I tried. DNF

A twisty turning mystery that keeps you entertained and thinking until the end. The author is great at letting small parts of the true “story” of the Alperton Angels come together slowly while a second story around the main character develops underneath it. This one does require some attention as there are lots of characters with double names and timelines to follow. Overall it was a lot of fun and I did enjoy it. I definitely great summer read if you like to puzzle.