They’re back!! The Fairway Players have returned for another production just in time for the holidays! Nothing says the holidays like—Jack and the Beanstalk?!

The play is hardly the thing when there’s a murder that happens! Attorneys Femi and Christina are also back to sift through the correspondence and documents to figure out whodunnit.

I absolutely love puzzles and loved The Appeal by Hallett so this book was nothing short of fun! I enjoyed reading through all the correspondence to see the story unfold and figure out what was going on! Plus, the usual shenanigans of the citizens of Lower Lockwood adds a wonderful dose of levity and enjoyment to the story. Plus, it’s a perfect holiday read!

Thank you to NetGalley and Simon & Schuster for an advanced reader copy of The Christmas Appeal.

I read The Appeal earlier this year, so I knew I needed to get my hands on the next one. This is not your normal sappy Christmas book! That it is definitely not!

The author does a fabulous job of unraveling a mystery solely through e-mails, texts and police reports....a real talent to tell a story successfully in this format.

I read this book in a day...hope there's another one!

Something is in the air and it’s this cozy mystery. Reading Christmas books before December has never been so fun! You’ll laugh out loud and love every second

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for a copy of this ARC in exchange for an honest review!

4 Stars!!

This was such a fun read for me. It is a short story, so I was able to complete it in one sitting. The story was told using several emails and text messages. This made it more unique to me, as I haven't read a story told that way quite yet. The Christmas Appeal provided the Christmas vibes while also giving the aspects needed for the mystery feeling to be present. There is also humor put in throughout the book. The parts where the story is told through messages, you will have to pay closer attention to catch all of the details and to figure out what tone is being used. Overall, I really enjoyed this book. I liked it a little more than the first book even.

I really wanted to love this one - the idea of not only modern Agatha Christie but around Christmas time is wonderful but unfortunately it wasn’t for me. The characters fell a bit flat and I just found myself a bit bored.

The book successfully balances humor and suspense, making it an engaging read for fans of both mysteries and Christmas stories. The characters are well-drawn, and their interactions add depth to the plot. As the mystery unfolds, readers will find themselves trying to guess who might be on the naughty list and the identity of the killer.

The Christmas Appeal is a heartwarming and entertaining novel that captures the essence of the holiday season while keeping readers on the edge of their seats with its intriguing plot. It's a perfect choice for those who enjoy a cozy mystery with a festive twist, and it will leave you eagerly awaiting the next holiday season and the next case for Femi and Charlotte.

A wonderful and quick mystery read! Returning to the world of The Appeal, The Christmas Appeal once again centers around The Fairway Players only this time, the mystery involves a body in a beanstalk. While it is not 100% necessary to read The Appeal first, I highly recommend it. For those that have read the first installment, this will be a fun return to the world of Lockwood, and shed some light on what happened after the last book's events. This would be a perfect read for a holiday night, with a warm drink in hand and sitting next to a warm fire! Thank you to Atria Books and Netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for my honest review,

Firstly I want to say a huge thank you to Atria books for providing me with an ARC of this novel through NetGalley. I really enjoy Hallett’s writing and this novella was so much fun! If you liked The Appeal then you could enjoy this one as well. We’re back in Lockwood and revisit many of the characters from The Fairway Players. This was an engaging and quick read. I look forward to reading more of Hallett’s novels!

I have read, thoroughly enjoyed, and highly recommend all three of Janice Hallett’s previous full length novels (each one is truly outstanding). I was thrilled to have the opportunity to read an advanced DRC of The Christmas Appeal, both because Hallett has become a must read author for me in general and because this novella is a sequel of sorts or at least a companion work revisiting the characters and setting of The Appeal, her first novel, which originally hooked me on her superior writing and unique and creative structures. However, I want to stress that The Christmas Appeal can be read and enjoyed by readers who haven’t read The Appeal.

The Christmas Appeal takes readers back or introduces them to the Fairway Players, a local community theater group full of an eclectic group of members who take the group with a level of seriousness ranging from casual social activity to working in the Royal Shakespeare Company to a political game rivaling those in the court of Henry VIII. While shorter and therefore containing less complex of a plot than Hallett’s novels, this novella has an engaging mystery with plenty of subtle plot clues mixed with hilarious interactions between characters, all delivered in an epistolary style including emails and texts. The mystery nearly made the mistake of having and ending that was too tidy and straightforward, but fortunately it took an unexpected turn at the end that made it very satisfying, as Hallett’s resolutions always are. Highly recommend to readers new to Hallett as well as devotees and can’t wait for her next book!!!

I highly recommend reading “The Appeal” by this author before picking up this one. I love books with mixed media elements. I enjoyed that this whole book was told through emails, texts, and letters. Through the mixed media aspects we learn about the events as they were happening and what is going on behind the scenes.

The book focuses on a bunch of people in a play run by rival families who are trying to be on top after an issue from the first book. The fact that there were so many characters is usually daunting but this book gave such a comprehensive run down of each one it was very easy to follow. It was hard to trust any characters or their motives, there were so many agendas behind the scenes.

Overall I really enjoyed reading this one and thought it had a solid storyline. There were a lot of twists and turns, many I didn't see coming. I loved that there was also a comprehensive run down of all theories going on in the detectives minds. I highly recommend this to everyone.

A wonderful, hilarious follow up to The Appeal -- I absolutely loved being back with the Fairway Players and back in the world of Janice Hallet. She's becoming an author to pay serious attention to for me, and this book was such a fun addition to an already impressive catalogue. It's the perfect little Christmas mystery and I'm definitely going to add this my collection.

Janice Hallett returns us to the world of The Fairway Players in her latest epistolary novella “The Christmas Appeal.”

As the dramatic group prepares for its special one-day-only Christmas time production of “Jack and the Beanstalk” to benefit the Church Hall Roof Fund, newly appointed co-chairs Sarah-Jane and Kevin MacDonald face backlash from former leaders Celia and Joel Halliday. As they work to overcome obstacle after obstacle, can Sarah-Jane and Kevin overcome dire events on the night of the event to pull off a successful fund-raiser?

Told by using text messages, e-mails, police interviews and other written formats, Hallett fills “The Christmas Appeal” with cheeky fun, twists and turns, and unique characters. She keeps the reader guessing and even adds some unexpected developments.

Fans of Agatha Christie, Richard Osmond’s Thursday Murder Club series, and Robert Thorogood’s Marlow Murder Club series will love this short story.

The novella, which is due out Oct. 24, does include occasional curse words, for those concerned about that.

Five stars out of five.

Atria Books provided this complimentary copy through NetGalley for my honest, unbiased review.

The Fairway Players are back in The Christmas Appeal, a novella-length sequel to Janice Hallett’s delightful mystery The Appeal. This time around, the U.K. community theater is planning to stage “Jack and the Beanstalk” as its annual Christmas panto. As was the case in the original book, the story is told in the form of emails and text messages.

The centerpiece of the production will be an enormous beanstalk, which has been used and abused by numerous theatrical companies over the years (and may or may not contain asbestos). Tensions run high, and not all of the Fairway Players are rooting for the panto to succeed, despite its lofty aim of raising money to fix a church roof.

There are several very funny moments in the book. My own local community theater did “Glengarry Glen Ross,” David Mamet’s notoriously foul-mouthed play, a few years ago, to mixed reaction from the mostly-elderly attendees; here, we learn from one Player’s cheerful Christmas newsletter that the Fairway production “removed the swearing, changed the setting to Lockwood so that we could use our own accents, and gave it a happy ending. David Mamet himself sent his congratulations on a triumphant production.” (Later, it’s revealed that the notoriously prickly playwright actually sent a cease-and-desist letter.)

Once again, references to pounds and pence are changed to dollars and cents, something that drove me batty in the U.S. edition of the original Appeal. It’s especially odd considering all the references to Gary Lineker, an English football star and commentator who has, shall we say, a somewhat lower profile on this side of the Atlantic. (“Ted Lasso” fans may remember him from his appearance in the season two episode “Beard After Hours.”)

Still, The Christmas Appeal is a fun, quick read (it took me a little over an hour to finish) that fans of the original novel will savor—perhaps while enjoying a mug of hot cocoa and a gingerbread cookie.

I loved, loved, loved this quirky little mystery composed entirely of emails, police reports and similar documents that are sent to two lawyers by the retired Kings Counsel who trained them. He's identified another mystery involving the Fairway Players in Lockwood, who are preparing to put on their annual pantomime on December 23rd to raise money for the church roof. They have a vested interest in this as the church is where this community theater group holds its performances. There is a book using the same approach that Hallett wrote involving the same group. It's called The Appeal.

I laughed out loud at the competition and snarkiness between the couple that thought they would run the theater after its founders left and the couple that was elected to head the theater. I easily followed the plot even though it took me awhile to figure out who was reviewing the documents WE are reviewing them, along with two young lawyers, to figure out what mischief some folks are up to, the nastiness people can get up to when the most important thing in their lives is the community theater, the craziness that goes with staging even a one night show including putting together goodie bags for children and figuring out who will play Santa cause the Santa of many years passed away. This format does not work for people who are easily confused when trying to follow a series of emails and who is sending them and why. It was a treasure for me. It's only tangentially Christmassy and would be enjoyed all year round.

When retired lawyer, Roderick Tanner, sends lawyers Femi Hassan and Charlotte Holroyd email correspondence from the Fairway Players theater group, he states that there is a mystery involved.
In December the Fairway Players were going to put on a pantomime of Jack and the Beanstalk to raise money for the church roof. The Hallidays are upset because they had not been elected to head the group, the MacDonalds are now in charge. They are very busy and trying to get everyone organized while at the same time, recruiting new members.
All this intrigue, snide backbiting and helpful asides are all related through emails and texts and as the story progresses, more information is added on by Tanner, until the final mystery is solved.
It was an enjoyable storyline in the unusual way that it unfolded, but at first, had a difficult time understanding who was who, the timeline of all the happenings and how they all needed to fit together at the end.
Thank you NetGalley and Atria Books for this e-galley novella of "The Christmas Appeal".

The Christmas Appeal by Janice Hallett is a compelling read. Well written with fully defined characters. Well worth the time!

If you’ve read Janice Hallett’s The Appeal (and it is ideal, though not strictly necessary, to do that before reading this book), then you’re familiar with the Fairway Players, an amateur theatrical group in the English village of Lockwood. As with The Appeal, the story in this book is presented in the form of documents, mostly WhatsApp messages, emails, and the like. This format helps to convey the chaos of trying to put on a Christmas pantomime of Jack and the Beanstalk with a group of amateurs, some of whom are dim, many self-absorbed, and a couple downright determined to show up the current director as a failure.

The chaos reaches its crescendo during the one-night only performance, when a corpse in a Santa suit tumbles from the onstage giant beanstalk. Was it murder? If so, whodunnit? Even if not, how did the body get in the beanstalk and why?

This novella makes a fun short read, perfect for those long afternoons during the holidays.

An epistolary tale of a amateur dramatic society's Christmas pantomime gone wrong. From emails and texts flying back and forth one deduces that the success of director Sarah's classic panto is in the sights of a rival director, temporarily tying the whole production into knots. Although I am not familiar with the beloved Christmas panto-- I only know there is such a thing-- I loved it; witty and a lot of fun, reminiscent of "the play that goes wrong" players if you like them.

This book was such a fun read. The witty writing had me laughing out loud. The characters had me invested. And as much as I want to reread this in December, the mysterious aspects made me enjoy it in October all the same. Very fun!

A fun holiday take that returns us to the world of murder and the Fairway Players.

The Fairway Players are busy this holiday season rehearsing for their production of Jack and the Beanstalk to raise funds for the new church roof. Of course, like in The Appeal, there are tons of petty rivalries and seemingly-minor backstage problems. Then a dead body shows up on the stage. Who is to blame? Lawyers Femi and Charlotte again investigate letters, emails, and police transcripts to identify the victim and the killer.

It was delightful to be back in the world of the Fairway Players. Everyone seems to be so enmeshed in petty drama and acts of sabotage. I enjoyed getting to figure out the mystery along with Femi and Charlotte. It's interesting to see how their interpretations varied from my own. I think the only real drawback of this story is that it's really only novella-length. I think getting a chance to explore all the corners of the story a bit more would have been fun.

Overall, if you're looking for a fun Christmas whodunit, I definitely recommend picking this one up. It's fast-paced and surprisingly emotional (both laughter and sadness). Take a look at the content warnings, as there are some tough topics discussed, but overall it's a lighthearted taste of chaos.