The Twyford Code: Winner of the Crime and Thriller British Book of the Year

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The incident has haunted Steven ever since. He blames himself. Miss Isles only took them to the coast that day because of the Edith Twyford book Steven had found and brought to class. Miss Isles was convinced there were coded messages within the book to some lost treasure. I could probably reread this book and STILL NOT follow the code inside, but when everything is revealed it was NOT AT ALL what I expected it to be, and OH SO SURPRISING!! The Twyford Code is a strange book to review, because it works in a number of ways and is incredibly clever, but struggles a little as a reading experience. The ending changed tone because you are listening instead to Stephen’s Son who is a professor and has received the files from a police officer. (It does state this at the beginning just after the encrypted dedication.)

Oh dear…It isn’t often I don’t finish a book but I seriously debated whether to persevere with this one. I did finish it though and in hindsight wish I had just DNF’d it. I was looking forward to reading it as The Appeal was a genuinely fun read, but I found this annoying and to be honest, tedious. Nevertheless, due to the interest that Steven and the other four students in her remedial English class showed in studying a banned book, Miss Isles dedicated some lesson time to reading passages from Six on Goldtop Hill, and here Hallett delivers some delightfully funny pastiches of the most sexist aspects of Enid Blyton’s oeuvre. It turned out that Miss Isles was actually quite the expert on Twyford, particularly the conspiracy theory that alleged the writer had used her books to send secret coded messages to the enemy during World War II. Dad worked in a video shop. It might sound archaic, but videos were like the mobile phones of the 80s and 90s. He considered himself a bit of a yuppy. Mum worked in an office for the gas board. Forty years ago, Steven Smith found a copy of a famous children’s book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. Wanting to know more, he took it to his English teacher Miss Iles, not realising the chain of events that he was setting in motion. Miss Iles became convinced that the book was the key to solving a puzzle and that a message in secret code ran through all Twyford’s novels. Then Miss Iles disappeared on a class field trip, and Steven has no memory of what happened to her.

A stunning book. A fiendishly clever yarn that hooked me from the first line to the final revelation' - Chris McDonald, author of Roses for the Dead While this plot leads in many directions, the reveal won me over! It is actually one of the best twists I have read in a long time! If you stay with the long journey to the truth, you will be rewarded!

I do have a couple of unresolved questions, but I am sure that is more to do with my own tiny brain trying to wrap itself around all the details, than an issue with the story. Nevertheless, those small items did make the experience a tiny smidge short of perfect for me.There are about 200 audio transcript files made by Steven Smith on an old iPhone. These recordings are supposed to be made for his parole officer, Maxine. He was recently released from prison after 11 years, serving time for murder. He tells the sad story of his home life and drifting into a life of crime with a notorious criminal family. He also is preoccupied with something that happened 40 years earlier. But it soon becomes clear that Edith Twyford wasn't just a writer of forgotten children's stories. The Twyford Code holds a great secret, and Smithy may just have the key.

And...... I just didn't love it at all. Still trying to get to grips with why not - it felt like it was trying to be too clever with the final unveiling of what the whole book was about, along with a very confusing (intentionally, I'm sure) mix-up of stories and narratives along the way. In fact, maybe its that the heart of the book is (to me) has an unreliable narrator, and I don't generally get on too well with them???I was a big fan of Hallett’s The Appeal. This book, not so much. For starters, it was very strange. There were large swaths when I just felt confused. You know that feeling that things just aren’t making sense but you can’t put your finger on why not? That was me. Another reviewer made a point about seeing this book through to the end. I heartily second that. 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).