Judy's Review:

This is a wonderfully entertaining who-dunnit, creepy and complicated, written in Janice Hallett’s inimitable cosy style of dossiers, emails, texts and recorded phone calls.

Amanda Bailey, a true-crime writer, is on a deadline to write a book about the Alperton Angels murders, a long ago apparent triple suicide in a mysterious London cult, the jailed leader of which calls himself The Angel Gabriel.

Amanda is amusingly amoral; lying is second nature to her as she tries to persuade witnesses to contribute to her book (“No, of course I’m not recording this”) when her sole purpose is to exploit every contact she makes.

Her assistant, Ellie, who transcribes Amanda’s recordings and interviews, is enjoyably acerbic, a real-life Jiminy Cricket to Amanda’s Pinocchio.

Richard's Review:

The actual mystery is dark and connected to the occult, involving the whereabouts of a baby.

The infant was referred to as The Antichrist by the Cult, who were planning ritual slaughter to protect the world from evil, but apparently killed themselves before they could murder the baby. After the triple- suicide, the mother and child vanished. In the past 18 years, anyone who tries to find them has mysteriously died in suspicious circumstances.

So this is the trail Amanda is determined to follow when she begins writing her true-crime book, thereby exposing herself to extreme danger.

Although the central mystery is pretty dark, this is actually a cosy crime novel in the style of Richard Osman’s hugely popular Thursday Murder Club books.

It’s warm, entertaining, funny, and if you like the cosy crime genre (and we love it) you will have a ball reading The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels.