The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels: the Bestselling Richard & Judy Book Club Pick

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After ensnaring the teenagers and convincing them that the baby was destined to doom humanity, they planned to kill the infant at the appointed time – 10 December 2003 – when five planets were due to align in a rare astral occurrence. However, despite the cult’s best laid plans, the ritual sacrifice did not go ahead as arranged, as Holly had second thoughts about the whole thing, took the baby to safety and called the police. I appreciate books that do this dossier format, here though I felt like the reader needed to want to play detective in a way that I never do in mysteries. I never go into a book trying to put on my detective hat with an old school pipe to suss out what really happened and which characters might be lying to me, and here I felt as though Hallett wanted the reader to construct their own murder board with doodles of characters connected by red string to really get the most enjoyment out of the book. The queen of the narrative twist. She takes the conventions of the modern mystery novel and upends them as Christie did. And the themes of this book are haunting -- S.J. Bennett, author of THE WINDSOR KNOT Brilliantly clever, ingenious in structure and throughly compelling. Full of wonderful characters and extremely funny! -- Sarah Bonner, author of HER PERFECT TWIN And yet, who knows? Maybe, that was the true intention of this story all along - as it's so graciously pointed out at the end - 'a cautionary tale' so to speak to all those, who don't look beyond their own machinations that eventually lead to their downfall. So, while I was a bit miffed by that message, I still believe it was worth the read - I did enjoy it. 👍🏻 It was almost as if I was watching a movie - that's how entertaining it was and kept my attention and interest to find out the truth for myself.

The Appeal was told mainly through letters, and The Twyford Code through transcripts. What documents do you use to tell the story in The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels?So, what is this about: Janice Hallett books are kind of their own subgenre now in my mind. She is becoming an autobuy and autoread, she writes puzzles in book form which I find really really entertaining and I want some more (even if none hit my mental barrier of full fledged 5 star reads, which can be a very subjective thing which I can not quite explain!) As Amanda and Oliver are forced to collaborate, they realise that what everyone thinks they know about the Angels is wrong. The truth is something much darker and stranger than they'd ever imagined. And the story of the Alperton Angels is far from over. From Matt Wesolowski’s Six Stories to Only Murders in the Building, fictional true crime and epistolary storytelling have become pretty popular – it might even be a movement. Do you see it that way and why do you think readers are gravitating to this and indeed to true crime?

So many writers have inspired me: Cervantes, Thomas Hardy, Emily Bronte, Agatha Christie, Enid Blyton, Patricia Leitch, Douglas Adams… and that’s only a few. True crime-auteur Amanda Bailey krijgt de opdracht om een boek te schrijven over het mysterie rond de Alperton Angels-sekte. Achttien jaar geleden vielen er in één nacht vier doden, werd de sekteleider opgepakt en verdwenen twee tieners met een baby, maar niemand weet wat precies heeft geleid tot de fatale gebeurtenissen en van de verdwenen personen ontbreekt nog altijd ieder spoor. Amanda is slim, doortastend, brutaal en vastberaden om eindelijk antwoorden te vinden op onbeantwoorde vragen, en om dat doel te bereiken hoopt ze de baby te vinden, of in ieder geval de tieners, en zo haar verhaal vanuit een uniek perspectief op te bouwen. Het is een ambitieus plan, en wanneer ze wordt gedwongen om samen te werken met een collega-journalist, iemand die haar in het verleden pijn heeft gedaan, wordt de zoektocht naar de waarheid steeds gecompliceerder. Allowing each character to speak for themselves is a great benefit of this style. I much prefer writing in the first person, where I can jump into that character and see the world from their perspective. As a screenwriter I had to write dialogue from every character’s perspective and I think my novels demonstrate an extension of that. There must be downsides but I haven’t discovered them yet. It feels quite natural to me to write this kind of novel.Nope, no happy ending here. Not for your brain either because that's just going to explode into such a big pile of mush that you'll forget your own name.