The Twyford Code

A decent enough crime story, told as a series of audio transcripts. Most of the story has twists and turns and are built around the idea of the “Twyford code”, a secret supposedly hidden in the text of a series of children’s novels. It includes stolen gold, a hoax from World War II, and mysterious men who want to prevent the person recording the tapes from finding out the truth.

The transcripts felt like a modern version of an epistolatory novel; I thought it would bother me more than it did.

The story is inconsistent and we learn not to trust the protagonist – there’s a fairly major twist at the end, and how well the book work rests on the quality of that twist. It mostly worked for me, but it did have a taste of “and it was all a dream”. I wasn’t entirely sold.

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