The Appeal

The Fairway Players, a small English amateur theater group, are mid-rehearsal when tragedy strikes their director's family: his young granddaughter is diagnosed with a rare cancer, and an experimental treatment abroad will cost an enormous sum. The community launches a fundraising appeal, and the effort exposes rivalries, resentments, and secrets running under the surface of the group. When a body turns up and an arrest is made, two junior lawyers are handed the full record of emails, texts, and messages and told to work out what really happened. The reader reads over their shoulders, piecing together the crime from a mountain of correspondence with no narrator to guide them, hunting for the one lie that unravels the case.