Janice Hallett

Hallett spent fifteen years writing about lipstick. She was a trade journalist covering the cosmetics industry, which is not the usual path to becoming one of Britain’s most talked about crime novelists. Before that, UCL for English, Royal Holloway for screenwriting. After the cosmetics years she moved into government communications, writing speeches for the Cabinet Office and the Home Office. She also co-wrote a horror film called Retreat and a Shakespeare comedy called NetherBard that won Best New Screenplay at the British Independent Film Festival in 2014. All of this somehow made sense when she published her first novel.

The Appeal came out in 2021 and it is told entirely through emails, text messages, letters, and community group notices. There is no narrator. You read the messages and figure out what happened yourself. A community theatre group runs a fundraising campaign and things go wrong in ways that take about three hundred pages to untangle. It was the second bestselling fiction debut in the UK that year and won the CWA New Blood Dagger.

“It’s like acting, stepping into different characters each day.”

The Twyford Code used voice memos and transcripts. The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels was told through competing documents from a true-crime writer and a journalist. Each book proves the format works for different kinds of stories, not just one. Readers treat her novels almost like puzzles, comparing notes about clues they caught or missed.

Quick facts

• Background: cosmetics journalist, government speechwriter, screenwriter
• Debut: The Appeal (2021)
• CWA New Blood Dagger (2022)
• Every novel told through documents, emails, and messages
• UCL and Royal Holloway

Her trick is making the boring mechanics of daily communication, group chats and forwarded emails and meeting minutes, into something you cannot stop reading. You are not watching a detective work. You are the detective.