By Janice Hallett

I raved about Hallett’s The Appeal earlier this year, but I’m savoring this one even more! The Alperton Angels uses the same epistolary style of collected emails, texts, and memos, but whereas The Appeal was more cozy mystery, this is religious suspense thriller, which is absolutely my bag. The same style that worked so well to bring out the humor in small community theater works equally well at building brewing creeping dread.

The first page sets the premise: you have access to the following collection of documents, do you take them to the police or hide them away forever? And when I first started, I wondered, what on earth would lead me to cover up a brutal murder?! Well, the presence of the antichrist might… (that’s a teaser, not a spoiler). The documents are the collected emails, texts, and transcribed interviews of a true crime author researching her latest project: years ago two teenagers rescued a baby from a doomsday cult that claimed it was the antichrist and planned to kill it to save the world. The cult itself was then found dead by ritual suicide by the cops that responded to the teen’s emergency call. After the first rush of news stories, with some suspicious discrepancies, the story went quiet and the teens and baby seem to have disappeared.

Our central author is approached by her publisher to revisit the story, and to pique the public’s interest, find the baby, who would be turning 18 this year. As she follows the various leads, more and more isn’t adding up, and then a competing author joins the search as well. That’s about as much as I want to say; since the mystery goes in so many different directions, anything else could be mild spoilers. There were so many twists and turns at the end, it was getting a little ridiculous, but I loved every one of them!