The Examiner - Janice Hallett *****

Ever since the release of her stunning The Appeal, Janice Hallett has amazed with her ability to tell a mystery story through the medium of a collection of documents - The Examiner maintains that remarkable quality. Here the main vehicle is a university intranet’s chat groups, though we do also get some emails and WhatsApp threads.

The setting is a new MA course in multimedia arts, where the six students are very diverse. We are told right up front that there is a suspicion that one of the participants has died. Once again, Hallett enables us to get a wonderful picture of the personalities of the course members and their tutor - and it rapidly becomes clear that something odd is going on. The delight is in working out exactly what has happened and why.

Along the way there are several big twists as different evidence emerges. One of these is brilliant - only achievable through this kind of storytelling. And while the underlying plot is in places quite dark, Hallett continues to be able to include a considerable amount of humour, often in the lack of self-awareness of some of her characters.

My only mild negative here is that elements of the plot when finally fully revealed are, to say the least, far fetched. But that didn’t spoil my continuing admiration for the skill with which Hallett assembles these amazing novels. The epistolary form often makes a book feel a little sterile, distancing the reader from the characters and from the action, but it never does in Hallett’s novels. Superb.

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