I didn’t expect all of this when I initially picked up this book. In fact, I wanted to read Hallett’s latest novel but this was the only book of hers that my library had, so I picked it up.

This was such a fun and fascinating mystery. There were a handful of times where I thought I was cracking the code but by the end I knew I hadn’t quite got it. And yet I still had fun reading along. It reminds me of that one Agatha Christie novel where the murderer was the narrator in the final pages of revelations. ( )

Very clever. The narrator, Steven Smith, has just been released from prison after many years. He decides to find out what happened to an old teacher who read a book by Edith Twyford. He records on a phone given to him by the son he never knew he had the story of his life and the search for the answers to what happened to his former teacher. We find out at the end of the book that the characters he writes about in his book and the author of the messages sent to son are all from Steven Smith, who is hidden away in an unknown island location. Kirkus: Through a series of audio recordings, a former felon recounts his attempts to solve a literary code that may lead to stolen gold�or maybe that's all a red herring.The novel begins with a letter written in 2021 from a police inspector to a professor, asking him to listen to a set of audio files that were found on an iPhone belonging to a man who's gone missing. What follows is a novel made up almost entirely of recordings and letters: recordings created by Steven Smith, who has recently been released from prison, wishes to connect with a son he never knew he had, and is haunted by a strange experience from his childhood that he only semi-remembers; and letters shared between Inspector Waliso and professor Mansfield in response to them. When Steven was a child, his teacher read the class a book by an author named Edith Twyford and then took them on a field trip that seems to have ended in tragedy. Trying to figure out what happened that day, he reaches out to the other children who were there and discovers that each of them has become fascinated with the ?Twyford Code? that the author seems to have threaded through her novels. Twyford may have been a secret British agent during World War II involved in Operation Fish, a secret mission to move all of Britain?s gold stores to Canada for safekeeping. As he is drawn deeper into the intrigue of the code, Steven also records the story of his life¥the deaths of his parents, his rough upbringing, and how he fell in with a family of criminals and eventually went to prison for theft. In a book with this many twists and turns, of course, there?s no way of knowing what's true and what's not, and Hallett continues to pull the rug out from under the reader every time we think we understand what's going on. The good: It?s complicated, in the best way, and the reveals over the last section of the book are truly gaspworthy. The bad: The recording gimmick does begin to feel a bit gimmicky, and this structure makes up 90% of the novel.Code lovers rejoice! This one?s for you.

DecipherIt™
Review of the Atria Books (USA) paperback edition (August 1, 2023) of the Viper Books (UK) hardcover original (January 13, 2022)

Because. Everyone in this room is clever enough to understand that this book belongs to another world. A different time and place. Then she gets a flourish in her voice and says: the past is a foreign country. They do things differently there. Who said that? She looked at us all expectant.
You just did miss. I knew how to make her laugh.
She tells us the name of whoever* said it, but blow me I can't remember now.

I was only so-so about Hallett's breakthrough book The Appeal (2021) which overstayed its welcome and wrapped up with an Unsatisfactory Ending Alert™. I enjoyed the novella-length sequel The Christmas Appeal (2023) though, probably because of the shorter length and the comic antics. Feeling goodwill towards Hallett I decided to go back to The Twyford Code (2022) and give it a chance.

The Twyford Code is actually pretty ingenious, but feels about 100 pages too long. Your attention and enjoyment start to flag towards the middle as too many repeat scenarios seem to occur. The concluding explanation though is quite brilliant and can't be discussed further due to spoiler territory. Along the way there are clues that what is going on is not necessarily everything that it appears to be. But really, I'd say this is an 'impossible to solve' (or 10 out of 10) mystery on the Berengaria Ease of Solving Scale® as the machinations and complexities are just pretty far out there. You end up admiring it in the end, but perhaps not loving it.

This is written in Hallett's trademark style of the epistolary novel, with the only tweak being that the texts are transcriptions of audio recordings. The transcriptions are done by a fictional app called DecipherIt™ which makes occasional mistakes. Those add a bit of fun to the proceedings as the reader then has to themself decipher what was really being said.

So it is somewhat of a reserved 4 star rating, mostly given for the tour-de-force ending!

Footnote
* It was author L.P. Hartley and it is the opening sentence of the novel The Go-Between (1953). ( )

Fun and highly inventive mystery novel, with just enough heart. Perhaps a little too tricksy, and slightly overlong, but still gripping. ( )

I think I could have loved this book. I did finish it but I lost concentration about half way through and then just couldn't get back in to it.

After finishing I wish I had read this more carefully and tried to figure out the mystery. I was reading it as a standard story and wasn't looking for clues as to what might be going on. If I had gone in to this book as a mystery to solve and not just a suspense that would solve itself, I really think it would have been highly enjoyable

On the back of the book there is a quote from Marion Todd which I think describes the story perfectly, "Enid Blyton meets Agatha Christie with a cracking twist." ( )