Twyford Code

Digital Download

English language

Published Jan. 24, 2023 by Atria Books.

ISBN:
9781668003244

View on OpenLibrary

4 stars (1 review)

Forty years ago, Steven “Smithy” Smith found a copy of a famous children’s book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. When he showed it to his remedial English teacher Miss Iles, she believed that it was part of a secret code that ran through all of Twyford’s novels. And when she later disappeared on a class field trip, Smithy becomes convinced that she had been right.

Now, out of prison after a long stretch, Smithy decides to investigate the mystery that has haunted him for decades. In a series of voice recordings on an old iPhone, Smithy alternates between visiting the people of his childhood and looking back on the events that later landed him in prison. 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 …

6 editions

reviewed The Twyford Code by Janice Hallett

Astonishing book by astonishing author

4 stars

The author renders the traditional thriller with a very original twist in this novel where the story unfolds be reading one's way though a series of transcriptions of audio files. She plays with the fact that it is a machine transcription where words can easily get misspellt, for instance "mustard" instead of "must have", and all this while the dictator of the files getting transcribed is hunting for something by unraveling a code.

You can already see the complications, transcription mistakes, code to decipher based only on said transcription.

A pleasure to read!