once again Hallett proves why she is my current undisputed favorite mystery author! the mixed media is so much fun to follow, and makes her books so easy to binge, and you can always count on clever well-timed reveals throughout. this one is best gone into pretty blind - just know it follows 6 students and their professor in an MA course. Hallett’s stories shine because even though she usually has a large cast of characters, she takes a lot of time building them and letting the reader sense their dynamics before diving into the mystery aspect. another winner from her!

I love Hallett's writing style & the choice to incorporate mixed media into her books; this was no different! I had a great time, I was gripped by the mystery & it's a fairly quick read! Highly recommend!

Thank you NetGalley and Atria Books for the opportunity to read this book in exchange for an honest review.

I love Janice Hallett and her style of writing in the mixed media format. This is the third book of hers I have read, but I own her other two and I plan to read them soon. The Examiner starts out slow but I feel you should stick with it because once the twists come, several of which I did not see coming, it really starts to pick up and then it is really hard to stop reading. There are six students taking an art class for their masters distinction. When two students fail to show up to class, one student begins to question why. Did someone get murdered, and if so by whom? I really enjoyed the mystery and I plan to get to her others soon.

The characters in this story are absolutely insufferable, which does make the reading experience a bit more fun. Along with the format of texts, emails, chats, the characters compel the story. I didn't rate it higher due to how I felt the ending was spelled out and that the clues were minimal throughout. I also thought it was about 100 pages too long.

What a unique story! Six students, a tutor and an examiner in an art course creating a team project for a business. This story will have you thinking twice about any team you are on. Everyone on this team has a different agenda. When some of them stop coming to class is there something going on. Has there been a murder?

This book is told in chat sessions and essays written by the students for the class. This is the first time I am reading a book written like this. I thoroughly enjoyed it. I was trying to figure who was who and also who gets murdered. In the end I was surprised as I had not suspected some of the twists. What a wonderful read. I recommend giving this book a try.

Thank you to #NetGalley, #JaniceHallett and #AtriaBooks for a copy of this book.
#TheExaminer

This book is both compelling and confusing (in a good way.) It kept me guessing all through until the last pages. There were good plot twists. I liked the format of chats and reports. I liked most of the characters, except for one who was so irritating I was sure she would be the murder victim! Overall, I enjoyed it and recommend it. I will be looking for other books by this author. Thank you to Netgalley and Atria books for giving me a copy.

I requested this book because I read The Appeal a while ago and thought it was both innovative and smart. The Examiner is in the same vein, as it lays out the plot entirely through mixed media format. The basic premise is that the evaluator for a graduate-level arts course begins to suspect foul play amongst the students and wants others to examine the evidence.

What worked for me: I love the mixed media format. Piecing together the plot line through text messages, e-mails, and other non-narrative formats is appealing to my inner detective. Janice Hallett is an absolute genius at conveying not just plot points but subtle character details through these non-traditional formats. It's really clever at how she's able to flesh out her characters with zero narrrative text! Overall, I give this book a solid 3 stars. I could probably even be convinced to round it up to 4 stars due to how clever it is.

What didn't work as well for me is that the plot line seems to be pretty bonkers. I'm not 100% that I completely grasped what happened, but I understood enough to know that the plot veered way into the land of disbelief. The first part of the book seemed to move very slowly, but once I made it to the 50% mark it moved a lot quicker. Even so, once I made sense of what was going on I was kind of disappointed. It's crazy, yes, and that detracts a little bit from the character development.

That being said, if you enjoyed any of Janice Hallett's earlier books, I think you will want to give this one a try. I would also recommend it to readers who read and loved the Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle as well as The Kingdoms by Natasha Pulley. This is a cerebral book and it's not one you can just pick up and halfway pay attention to.

Finally, I would recommend to readers that they should pick up the print version of this book. I read the e-book version and I would have liked to to have flipped back to certain sections to keep track of the characters.

Janice Hallett has done it again. This mystery is told in mostly message board, texts, and school essays was so layered that once it got to the meat of the story - a missing student, I could not put it down. Hallett’s style can be a little disorienting at first but it helps develop her characters and plot so that the storytelling is very satisfying and her overall themes really stand out.

This story is about six students and their professor in a small one-year master program in art at a well-respected university. The book covers the entire academic year and at first it seemed like the story would center around petty grievances between group mates but it was much larger in scope. Throughout the story, Hallett reveals more and more about the students and how they ended up enrolling in the course. There are some big surprises towards the end and like all of Janice Hallett’s work - the story isn’t exactly linear but it is pretty easy to follow.

Beyond just being a mystery about a missing person, it’s also a book that begs the reader to ask larger questions about group dynamics, value systems, and confirmation bias. I found myself pulled into the conspiracies almost as much as the characters. I’ve read all of Hallett’s mysteries and while this isn’t my absolute favorite it’s a great addition to her catalog. I look forward to her next one.

I received this book from the publisher via an ARC from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Truly, in Janice Hallett we trust. She has easily cemented herself as one of my all time favourite authors, and that's quite hard to do that for a mystery/thriller author. It's not my typical genre. However, something about her books just work for me. This one was absolutely no exception. In fact, I think it might just be my second favourite of her works.
The first half of this book was a bit on the slower side. We spend a lot of time getting to know our cast of characters and their inner dynamics. They truly are an odd bunch with some very pronounced personalities, not at all likeable either. We get to see them interact over messages, and other school related communications. It was incredibly interesting to see events that happened of page (aka in class) discussed differently within different conversations/group chats or even official reports. It becomes very clear pretty early on that there's A LOT of tension within this group. Every so often we also get messages between the examiner and some other outsiders discussing the case. This makes it VERY clear that those tensions are only the start of our journey. As the book continues, more and more threads get introduced. There's a lot of questions, oddities haunting the characters. I was very excited to see all these little inklings turn into something bigger.
Then around the halfway mark we finally arrive at this big event the whole book basically counts down to. Quickly it all starts to unravel. Tensions rise to their hights, and people can't hold the facade anymore. Everything starts moving much more quickly as we finally delve in the meat of the mystery, and therefore also start to solve things. I definitely saw some aspects coming, but overall this book went in a completely different direction than I could ever expect going into this book. My jaw definitely dropped a few times. I was on the edge of my seat, and just couldn't read fast enough. The only thing keeping this book from a five star to me is that in the end I do feel like some threads could have been tied up just a little neater. Now, I get why it is as open as it is, but I just wanted that tad bit more to be fully satisfied. Overall I still had quite a few questions left that I would have loved to have an answer to. However, I still really loved my time reading this book, and I do definitely HIGHLY recommend this one.

Another fun mystery from Janice Hallet. I enjoy the epistolary (ish? not just letters) format. Her books feel like an escape room puzzle as a book.

Hallett has again delivered a puzzle-box of a mystery, told in email and text threads, diaries, course notes and instructions. The Examiner is about a fledgling multimedia art program, merging art with the corporate world, as the six candidates work together on a campaign for a communications company. The cover says it all: "Six Students. One Murder. Can You Solve the Crime?"

The Examiner proved entertaining, with Hallett doing impressive work giving individual personalities to the students, their tutor, the staff at the college. The students are quirky and their voices, competencies (or lack thereof) and motivations stand out. We see what they say to each other in their public message board, and we get the bigger picture with what they say to each other privately. They are all up to something, aren't they?

There are twists and turns, people are dodgy, at about 25% in the story there's a class field trip that changes the trajectory and where it goes from there is anybody's guess. Seriously. Layers are peeled back, more thrown on, it's clever and exciting and funny and a lot is foreshadowed and there are some truly WTF moments. Something is going to happen! Murder! Lies! Art!

My thanks to NetGalley and Atria Books for the digital ARC.

Oh Janice Hallett! You did the deed again. You created characters that evoke very strong and different feelings in me. You made me hate Jem as I hated Joffrey Baratheon. We eventually understood why she was the way she was but damn! If I had to face someone like Jem in a professional environment, I would have humbled her in a second. Her my dad will hear about this and I'll get what I want attitude wouldn't do a thing to me.

Masters of Art program. 6 students with different specialties. They had to work individually and as a team to get this degree. Team work was little bit tougher than expected though with all levels of egos getting on a piss fight. You don't expect masters programs to include murder, but this one had. However, the question here was not how but who? Would their teams messages be enough to solve the riddle?

Every time Janice Hallett publishes a new book, I scream with joy. I just want to see what type of mystery she hid in those emails, texts, reports, letters, and whatever new medium she wanted to use. Connecting all these dots, while not doing so in prose, is some serious skill. NEVER STOP!

This is another multi-media mystery from Janice Hallett. I was flying through this to see what would happen next, and the reveals never felt like cheats. Because we're following an art class, it feels like we could have had even more media inserted into the story, but that's a small pet peeve for such a fun read. A larger negative for me is the last quarter or so of the book veers off in a direction that didn't feel successful and led to an unsatisfying conclusion. I would rather have an author really go for it than to always play it safe, so I still really enjoyed the book overall even if the ending didn't quite land for me.

I love the format of Janice Hallett's books but I always come back to the plot being overly convoluted and I'm not invested in the characters. The Examiner was no exception. The characters were all unlikeable and the climate activist storyline never really fleshed out for me.

Thank you to NetGalley and Atria Books for the eARC.

What a unique set up of a story! I loved the message boards and the text conversations, the emails. It all unraveled so well. What a fun one!

I’m the one hand I really loved the format. I made the reading quicker and was just fun. On the other there were so many characters and so much not happening for so long. The whole middle of the book was so repetitive and the individual stories were a bit daunting when you’re hoping to move forward with the actual mystery. It was okay. 3.5/5⭐️

Man! That was a lot! In the beginning it was just a lot of pettiness and details about art installations. Then it got really complicated. I reread several parts to make sure I was keeping everyone straight by the end of it. Loved it.

Many thanks to NetGalley, Simon & Schuster Atria Books for gifting me a digital ARC of the latest mystery by a huge favorite, Janice Hallett. All opinions expressed in this review are my own - 5 stars!

Gela Nathaniel, head of Royal Hastings University’s new Multimedia Art course, must find six students from all walks of life across the UK for her new master’s program before the university cuts her funding. The students are nothing but trouble from day one. These students must collaborate for a final project - an art installation for a local cloud-based solutions company. But just who can you trust?

Janice Hallett is the master of mysteries told in epistolary style - this one through emails, text messages, and student essays. I love this style of writing when done right - and Hallett does it right. She deftly led you down one path, only to circle back, and lead you down another until you weren't sure exactly what was happening. With a relatively small cast of characters, there was no confusion there, although no one's motives were without question. I also appreciated the dark academic feel and appreciated the nod to lack of respect for art instruction. As with all of Hallett's books, this is a must read!

Thank you to Atria Books and Netgalley for this ARC in exchange for my honest thoughts.

I keep reading Hallett’s books because of how much I loved The Appeal. But I haven’t truly liked any since, and I think, in reading The Examiner, I finally figured out why. My issue is that this structure (an epistolary novel) works great for a cozy mystery. I deeply enjoyed getting to know the townspeople in The Appeal in all their eccentric glory. And the characters here are certainly also quirky and likable. But the mystery itself is a lot darker and more serious, and I don’t think that type of story is effectively conveyed through this medium.

Sorry to spend this review directly comparing this book to another, which I generally try to shy away from. But it’s for that reason that I didn’t really like this book, despite it being a fine (though a bit implausible) story on its own.

The Examiner is out now

2.5/5

That was a ride!! So intense! So twisty! A few things I slightly guessed at but I did not see a lot of the twists coming!