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