Less than four years ago, Janice Hallett tells me, she could have summed up her writing career with the words “years of failure.” Today, at 55, she is a fixture on the bestseller lists and is being hailed as the new queen of cozy crime. Readers flock to tell her that her novels are saving their lives.

“People come up to me at readings and events,” she says, “and say my books helped them through chemotherapy or through grief. And there was one woman who told me that The Appeal (Hallett’s first novel) helped her reconnect with her mother after ten years of estrangement because they had both read it and built a bond. She was very tearful, and so was I.”

The Appeal is a crime novel that revolves around an amateur theatre group in a sleepy village. What Hallett didn’t know when he wrote the book was that the twin phenomena of Covid-19 and Richard Osman would inspire a very gentle desire to murder in readers, just in time for the novel’s publication in January 2021. “I love Richard Osman’s books. I know people don’t like it when celebrities turn up and get book deals very easily, but I think when someone writes a book that brings so much power and passion to the genre, other authors can benefit from it.”

And yet Hallett is not entirely convinced by the label “cosy crime”. “I would say that there is a dark streak in all my novels. I think that although there are those very light-hearted novels where a cat solves the murder, most novels that seem cosy actually deal with dark themes – they just don’t linger lecherously on the details.”

It’s true that Hallett’s new novel, The Examiner, comes up with a method of murder that might make Thomas Harris a little uneasy, but she wraps it up in a story that’s as full of charm and humor as it is suspense and clever intrigue. Like all her previous books, it uses the strangely compelling narrative form of a dossier: she tells the story through emails, message board conversations and official documents.