I have loved all of Janice Hallett’s books and have been eagerly awaiting this one. It’s told through messages and letters that tell the story of a creative art MA course, through the assignment feeeback and group messages sent between the students and course-leader. There’s an investigation under way and all is not as it seems. Lots of twists and turns that kept me speeding through the chapters. Several twists that I did not see coming at all. I raced through it. However, I did find the most ending quite far-fetched and not too relatable. Still enjoyed it and would recommend.

Hallett is a master of the “found document” mystery, in which a sleuth or group is given a set of emails, transcriptions etc and asked to try to uncover a mystery. Everyone is a unreliable narrator, and the fun is in being surprised by the layers Hallett sets up in such a easy entertaining style. The Examiner is set in an art school with an unlikely course group of mature students, and demonstrates a fine familiarity with the milieu. From romance to high tech to graphic design and sabotage. Recommend!

I always enjoy the alternative approach that Janice Hallett takes with her books, giving the reader the same chance to solve the mystery as the characters reading the documents for the first time so I was intrigued to see what this might look like in a higher education setting. As Hallett cleverly indicates, there are always tensions running high in academia and particularly when there are elements of competition involved. In The Examiner we join the external examiner and course admin staff as they read through the the online message board and multimedia coursework that the students and tutor have been involved with over the year but it's not clear whether everyone has survived to celebrate finishing.

At times, I found the premise that they're always communication through Doodle (the online environment) was a bit of a stretch and it would have been nice to have more of a mix of 'sources' to get to know the different characters and see them from perspectives outside of the group (eg. more testaments from Griff the technician). I would say that the plot itself is on a par with her previous books but won't say any more to avoid spoiling the various twists.

Royal Hasting University has a new MA arts course. It wasn't advertised, and the six students were hand-picked by lecturer Gela.

An extremely odd mix of people,even for an arts course, things do not go right from the start.

But the strange occurrences really ramp up after the road trip to the tech company that the six are building an installation for as their final project.

Jem, the youngest of the students, begins to suspect that one of her classmates has disappeared...

...and the external examiner thinks that a student was murdered...

Extremely compelling and complicated - you really won't see the ending coming.

Brilliant