My partner bought this book for me because of my frustration with the ‘old friends meet in an isolated location and a murder happens’ trend of the moment, and it does deliver something really different. The Twyford Code offers three main mysteries – what happened to Miss Isles? What happened to Steven Smith, or what did he do, that sent him to prison? And what is the Twyford Code, and what does it lead to? The solutions to some of these puzzles are far more engaging than others, and one left me distinctly underwhelmed.

The majority of the text is a transcribed iPhone recording from a newly released prisoner, Steve Smith. In the transcript intended for his probation officer, he relays much about his past. We learn about his sad family life, illiteracy, time in Remedial English in High School, and his life of crime. Additionally, he is actively investigating the disappearance of his former English teacher, Miss Isles. This leads to the discovery of the Twyford Code, which was hidden inside a book he found on a bus as a teenager. After The Appeal, Janice Hallett once again gives us an unusual angle in the mystery genre in this wonderfully riveting, full of heart, a puzzle of a story. Here we are given transcripts of voice recordings made on a old IPhone 4, with all the fun of decyphering what is meant with some words and phrases in the narrative. Steven Smith has recently been released after a long stretch in prison, having suffered the loss of his wife and is estranged from a son who gave him the IPhone. For 40 years, Steve has been obsessed with the mystery of the disappearance of his remedial English teacher, Miss Isles. He had found a book on the bus, it was by Edith Twyford, a writer, similar to Enid Blyton, who had gone out of fashion, deemed to be xenophobic. Miss Isles reads the book to the class, but takes the book, never returning it to him, convinced it contains a puzzle and secret codes.

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Steven Smith has just been released from prison, and he is finally free to investigate a mystery that has haunted him since childhood. Forty years ago, he found a copy of a famous children's book, full of strange markings and annotations, which had been left behind on a bus he was riding. If you like the sound of The Twyford Code, you might also enjoy Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice or one of the Six Stories novels by Matt Wesolowski. But I also feel like I was misled a little by the blurbs that were included in my e-book of The Twyford Code. They suggested to me that the book had puzzles to solve and codes to break, so I was literally taking notes the whole time (which will be useful for my Spoiler Discussion). fulfilling my 2022 goal to read one book each month that was not published in my country that i wanted badly enough to have a copy shipped to me from abroad and then...never read.

The most richly accomplished of the brothers’ pairings to date—and given Connelly’s high standards, that’s saying a lot. The ending did help to improve my feelings about this book. Hallett truly came up with a very clever resolution to the story which I greatly enjoyed. And there were some very interesting facts in the Author’s Note. I also loved the fact that the mystery centres on a writer and the clues hidden in her novels – a kind of Enid Blyton figure whose books have now been abandoned by the new generation as being outdated and containing some very dubious racial and gender ideas. As a life-long bookworm who was raised on Blyton’s books, there was something very relatable and vivid in this idea. The majority of the story is made up of quasi-diary entries that our protagonist, Steven Smith, recorded on an old phone gifted to him by his estranged son. There are also conversations, phone and otherwise, with a varied cast.Is there any truth in the story behind the Twyford Code or is it just a myth or a figment of the author’s imagination? Is Miss Isle’s disappearance truly linked to The Twyford Code? Who are the people trying to prevent Steven from uncovering the truth? Can he trust his friends or do they know more than they are letting on? With this being said, I have never read anything like this and I am really looking forward to seeing what Janice Hallett delivers us next!