Told in emails, text messages, and essays, this innovative pause-resister follows a group of students in an art master’s program that goes dangerously awry, from the internationally bestselling “new queen of crime” (Electric Literature) Janice Hallett.
Gela Nathaniel, head of Royal Hastings University’s new Multimedia Art course, must find six students from all walks of life across the United Kingdom for her new master’s program before the university cuts her funding. The students are nothing but trouble from day one.
There’s Jem, a talented sculptor recently graduated from her university program and eager to make her mark as an artist at any cost. Jonathan, who has little experience in art practice aside from running his family’s gallery. Patrick runs an art supply store, but can barely operate his phone, much less design software. Ludya is a single mother and graphic designer more interested in a paycheck than homework. Cameron is a marketing executive in search of a hobby or a career change. And Alyson, already a successful artist, seems to be overqualified. Finally, there is the examiner, the man hired to grade students’ final works—an art installation for a local cloud-based solutions company that may have an ulterior agenda—and who, in sifting through final essays, texts, and message boards, warns that someone is in danger…or already dead. And nothing about this course has been left up to chance.
With her trademark “unique and exhilarating” (Megan Collins, author of The Family Plot) voice, Janice Hallett weaves a fresh and mind-bending mystery that will keep you guessing until the very end.
- Title: The Examiner
- Author: Janice Hallett
- Publisher: Atria Books
- Publication Date: September 10th, 2024
- Genre: Mystery
- Source: Digital ARC via Publisher/NetGalley in exchange for an honest review
- Targeted Age Range: Adult
- Content Warnings: fire, death, murder, death of a loved one (parents, siblings, grandparents), physical assault, blood, mentions of a rehabilitation facility
- Rating: ★★★★.5
I truly think that Janice Hallett is one of the most creative authors at the moment. Not only does she combine things that I love so effortlessly — mysteries and mixed media — but she does it in a way that is creative and innovative every single time. After each of her books I go “I don’t know how she’s going to come up with something more creative than that” and then she does!
Her latest release, The Examiner, gripped me from the start and as always with her books, once I started it I couldn’t put it down. Truthfully, there are very few people that I think could make a fully mixed media book compelling from start to finish, and Hallett has managed to do so five times over now. The struggle of characters coming through the text distinctively with only emails, text messages, and essays to show you who they are would be a monumental task for some, but it’s something that Hallett does with ease.
As with her previous books, each character in The Examiner has a clear and specific voice that differs from the others and shines through their messages from the first page. Right away you get a sense of these characters, and believe me, some of them will drive you crazy from page 1 to 480. Each character’s voice is so strong that you would be able to know who was speaking even if their messages didn’t have their name attached to them. Something that I love about mixed media storytelling is that we don’t typically get physical descriptions of these characters (at least not in detail, there will sometimes be things in passing) and certain reveals can take you completely by surprise. There was one reveal that came towards the end of the book that truly shocked me and changed my entire view of the character, their actions/motivations and how the other characters reacted to and interacted with them. I’d love to reread this book with that knowledge in mind, because I think it would change so much.
There was so much of this book that I just didn’t see coming. A few of the suspicions that I had did happen to be true, but I was always just outside of what was really happening, so so many of these reveals really shocked and surprised me, which I loved. I love the way that Hallett pieces a story together with each fact uncovered revealing more of the full picture to you. While the book continued to shock and surprise me as it went on, none of the twists seemed out of nowhere or out of character. Nothing was just for shock value; each reveal was necessary to the story being told. Hallett really is great at foreshadowing and wordplay as many times there would be little things said or mentioned that don’t give off warning bells at the time but come back into play later on very smoothly.
Once again, Hallett delivered a unique and interesting mystery that keeps the readers engaged and excited from start to finish. If you’re a mystery reader and not reading her work yet, you absolutely need to start!
Links for The Examiner: Goodreads | TheStoryGraph | Bookshop
Janice Hallett is a former magazine editor, award-winning journalist, and government communications writer. She wrote articles and speeches for, among others, the Cabinet Office, Home Office, and Department for International Development. Her enthusiasm for travel has taken her around the world several times, from Madagascar to the Galapagos, Guatemala to Zimbabwe, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. A playwright and screenwriter, she penned the feminist Shakespearean stage comedy NetherBard and cowrote the feature film Retreat. She lives in London and is the author of The Examiner, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, The Appeal, The Christmas Appeal, and The Twyford Code.
Follow Janice: Author Page | Instagram | Twitter
