Janet Hallett’s Digital Footprint Noirs are a fully modern take on crime fiction that swaps narration for documentation and hands the investigation over to the reader.
The Killer Question | Janet Hallett | Atria (448 pages)
This is the world Janice Hallett drops us into with her latest mystery, The Killer Question, where the digital footprints of semi-deranged trivia nerds become the evidence readers get to sort through. You think the truth is found in a sworn affidavit, but it’s really in the passive-aggressive WhatsApp messages.
Hallett’s inventive and unorthodox mystery, The Killer Question unfolds five years after a murky murder near a struggling country pub. When the owners’ nephew pitches a true-crime documentary, a meticulously crafted narrative emerges from the emails, group chats, texts, and police transcripts that form the evidence. The reader, acting as the legal mind, must piece together this fascinating puzzle box to uncover what really happened at “The Case Is Altered.”
And in an age where our real lives unfold on our screens in fragmented formats, the crucial question becomes: what counts as reliable evidence? Janice Hallett updates the mystery genre for the digital age, swapping the conventions of linear narration for a slow layering of receipts, confessions, contradictions and tone shifts.
Hallett’s sleight of hand is so effective in this forensic reconstruction narrative that I keep wanting to say she “constructs” or “builds” a novel — when, of course, she wrote one. And she wrote all of it. That’s the trick. These chat threads and emails might feel like found material, but they are deliberate, authorial and precise. In less capable hands, the format might be gimmicky. In Hallett’s, it becomes an argument about how stories work now. She uses the genre to ask: What counts as evidence? Who controls the narrative? Is anyone a reliable narrator, seriously, anyone?
It’s what I’m calling Digital Footprint Noir; a fully modern take on crime fiction that swaps narration for documentation and hands the investigation over to you. (Yes, I Googled it to see if anyone had used the term. So far, I think it’s mine. If you’ve got something better, drop it in the comments.)
What’s most delightful about Digital Footprint Noirs is that they are participatory mysteries. The brilliant, often eccentric detective (e.g., Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot), who once served as the reader’s guide, is replaced. While I love love love those traditional detective novels — nothing is more soothing than accompanying Miss Marple on her investigation — even I see the quaint veneer. In this genre, the reader becomes the investigator, sifting through a slow layering of receipts that invite you not just to follow along, but to judge. What’s more delicious than that?
A Case Built in Text Threads
Time to put the structure aside and move on to the heart of the matter, a murder. The plot quickens … in a struggling country pub (the aforementioned The Case Is Altered) whose fortunes have been almost revived by a fiercely competitive weekly trivia night. But when a mysterious new team, The Shadow Nights, appears and begins winning every round and, even more transgressive, usurping a regular team’s table, tensions escalate. Soon someone is dead, a body pulled from the river, and the pub’s owners (and no spoilers but what a backstory!) vanish under the shadow of a past that refuses to stay buried.
Five years later, the pub is boarded up and we’re reading an email chain with the owners’ nephew pitching a true crime documentary to a producer whose latest documentary streamed on Netflix. All very heady stuff. The producer is intrigued: What really happened at the pub? And — as the title poses — can a single question kill?
You Can Tell a Lot by an Ellipsis
One of Hallett’s signature pleasures is her use of competing voices, rendered almost through casual, fragmented, digitally-mediated language. Her books aren’t just plot puzzles; they are character mosaics. She builds people out of tone: punctuation, emoji use, passive-aggression, clipped sign-offs, text timing. Texts not answered. We come to know characters not by how they see the world, but by how they speak into it.
Take The General, the quizmaster-in-chief of The Shadow Nights. No one knows much about him. Not his profession, his personal life or even his name. He responds to the pub owners’ texts with cheerful opacity yet rarely answering a question directly.
Prompted only slightly, The General launches into a long-winded etymological explanation of the pub’s name, “The Case Is Altered,” tracing it back to a sixteenth-century legal dispute documented by Edmund Plowden. (Actually, I loved this fascinating transgression and went down that rabbit hole myself.)
The owners — Sue and Mal — are clearly just hoping for assurances the team will join them that week. The General, however, is a master deflector of a particular type: a charismatic, insufferable know-it-all who weaponizes Wikipedia.
The team comprised of older members, “Let’s Get Quizzical,” uses the most antiquated mode of communication, emails. (Their team leader, Sid, is very long winded and frequently off-topic). The pub owners are on WhatsApp; The Spokespersons (a team that bicycles to the pub) text. The youngest team player, Fiona, usually answers with a simple “K.” which seems to both amuse and irritate her teammates
Hallett uses the rhythms of digital life to both reveal and obscure, sometimes in the same moment. The WhatsApp group between the local pub managers — known as the Ye Olde Goat Brewery — provide both a narrative engine and a steady stream of delights. One of the Brewery group’s weekly rituals is “One-Star Monday,” when they share the worst Yelp reviews of their establishments:
“Everything was underdone — the leeks were hard, the green beans were dry, and a good vet could have got my steak mooing again.”
And then there’s my personal favorite, Peter Bond, proprietor of The Lusty Lass, who responds to almost everything with a cliché so perfect it becomes character development: “Empty vessels make the most noise.” “Trouble begets trouble.” “Competition is the thief of joy.” Hallett doesn’t need to tell us who the group’s curmudgeon is.
A Legal Master Mind Behind the Curtain
Hallett’s triple-threat background as lawyer, screenwriter and journalist is visible: This is a novel that builds like a well-written legal brief, reads like a hit screenplay and gives the thrill of a front-page scoop.
This isn’t the first time Hallett’s used this format. In her debut novel, The Appeal, two young lawyers face a Herculean challenge: blitzing through almost two years of emails, texts, and messages so they can assist with an appeal brief due within days. Oh, and it turns into a murder case. In the novella The Christmas Appeal, the action unfolds around a disastrous holiday play, where the drama backstage quickly overtakes the panto onstage, and the reader must deduce who’s lying, who’s missing, and who’s dead.
Dracula, Meet Your WhatsApp Group
While the digital format is undeniably new, the idea of telling a story through a collection of diverse documents has a rich literary history.
The most direct ancestor is the classic epistolary novel, where the story is told through letters. Samuel Richardsons Pamela (1740) is an early and famous examle. Even closer to the modern “found documents” style is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), which brilliantly weaves together journal entries, ship’s logs, newspaper clippings and telegrams to create a chilling tale of horror.
A more examples are Max Brooks’s World War Z, a spectacular and beloved example of oral history, detailing a zombie apocalypse thought a series of of individual interviews with survivors, each offering a unique perspective. Like Hallett’s work, it rejects a single narrative authority in favor of fractured, conflicting testimonies that ask the reader to piece together the truth.
Ctrl + F for Clues
So yes, there’s a murder. But the real mystery I cared about most was this: How are The Shadow Nights cheating? Because they must be. And, I also eagerly turned pages wondering about the history of every character, many of whom have secret or tragic pasts that were slowly emerged.
It’s this constant drip of information that keeps the reader invested, much like the producer who can’t wait for the next installment.
“Of course, any good story will deliver lots of hooks all the way through and I can’t wait for the next one. Do send more as soon as you can.”
There are lots of hooks in this story. If this is where crime fiction is going, I’m along for the ride. And after finishing The Killer Question, one thing is clear: Janice Hallett is absolutely the Queen of Digital Footprint Noir. So, do send more as soon as you can. (Just don’t ask me to join your trivia team.)
Fine print: Thanks to Atria and NetGalley for the ARC. Originally published by Books Are Our Superpower.