[Review] The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels - Janice Hallett

Summary: Everyone knows the story of the Alperton Angels: the cult who brainwashed a teenage girl into believing her baby was the anti-Christ. When the girl came to her senses and called the police, the Angels committed suicide and mother and baby disappeared.

Now, true crime author Amanda Bailey is looking to revive her career by writing a book on the case. The Alperton baby has turned eighteen; finding them will be the scoop of the year. But rival author Oliver Menzies is just as smart, better connected, and also on the baby’s trail.

As Amanda and Oliver are forced to collaborate, they realize that the truth about the Angels is much darker and stranger than they’d ever imagined, and in pursuit of the story they risk becoming part of it. (Pub Date: Jan 23 2024)

 

True crime writer Amanda is convinced to write about an old case of suicide due to a cult that had survivors and yet the story remains mysterious and the few witnesses are contradictory. To make her task harder, she's forced to collaborate with Oliver, with whom she's had a falling out many years ago. 

3+

I was surprised when I saw my review for The Appeal, because I remember loving its quirkiness, but from how I rated, maybe it's a book that grows more in you with time. I didn't want to read it all since comparison has already gotten in the way of my enjoying this new work more. What I mean is that I'd probably like it more if I hadn't had expected the same spins along the development The Appeal brought us. I kept waiting for it and when it felt like it would finally come, the story went somewhere else. And then without any preparation it would drop some secret the main character had hidden from us. Which is fine, I don't see it as a betrayal, but it felt like a waste of a twist, like a bad stand up that misses the delivery of what could have been a good joke. 

The story is still curious. It's told like The Appeal, although now we have many more transcriptions of dialogs with the colorful comments by the transcriber that for most of the time were welcome but others they were ill-disguised ways of inserting description. Aside from that, the method of exposing the story was great and fun. The story flows well, save for what I said above, the wrong timing of some of the twists. 

One other thing that bothered me was some of the coincidences. I have this thing that authors have a leeway with coincidences. They do happen in life, after all. But you've gotta dose them or any reader will grow suspicious, and for a thriller they must stay at minimum, or the reader will see the author's hands behind it. For the story the book wants to tell us to have really happened people would have had to acted in such a way that it's hard to forget this is merely fiction. Unfortunately, much before I even got to the final quarter I had already frowned too many times for me to trust the author to awe me, all the engines that brought us to the final result felt tightly calculated to be there, so of course we'd get there. 

I know I sound overly critical of this piece for someone who rated it 3+. It's a good thriller, and it's entertaining, quick to read. The plot itself is also intriguing. Some may be predictable from the beginning, but most of it wasn't, which made me avidly "turn the pages" in my ereader. I wish I could have known more of each character, but even with the lacking way they're presented (the main character included), they were people I wanted to know more about, I cared about. The ending was a little on the long side, but it was also satisfactory. In all, it's a read I'd recommend friends fans of thrillers in search of their next.

Honest review based on an ARC provided by Edelweiss. Many thanks to the publisher for this opportunity.

Rating: 3 out of 5.