I listened to the audiobook of THE EXAMINER on the strength of a bookseller recommendation, and it blew my mind.

This was my first  Janice Hallett thriller and it won’t be my last. I love her unique approach to the epistolary novel.

The story, told through emails, texts, essays, and a secured messaging app, comes alive through a full cast. It opens with an online group chat between six students enrolled in a new multimedia art MA program at Royal Hastings University in England. The course will take a year, and the students come from diverse backgrounds and have different levels of expertise.

Introductions between them quickly twist into a mystery on multiple levels. We are privy to texts that reveal petty rivalries and suspicious goings-on. A separate group chat between outside examiners one year into the future reveals that something bad has happened. One of the examiners is convinced that a student has been murdered and the others are involved in a cover-up.

Tensions between the students and the head of the program intensify in the lead-up to the final group project with an outside company—that may or may not be guarding national secrets.

As the two timelines converge, the plot becomes more than a complex whodunnit (brace yourself for the mind-bending).

Everyone has well-guarded secrets; everyone has their own motivations for taking the MA course; and until the end, we have no idea who the victim is—or even if there IS a victim. On some level, everyone is up to no good!

This is a fast-paced story with complex characters who are all unreliable narrators.

A brilliant, wildly entertaining audiobook.