The Examiner

I love a mystery! I love an epistolary novel! However, The Examiner just did not work for me. This is largely going to be a negative review, so feel free to skip. If I wanted to pitch this book positively, I would say that it is a mystery novel about an art master's program told through the artifacts of its forum posts, class assignments, and group chats. An external examiner has been called in to make an accounting of the program, and becomes increasingly concerned that somebody may have died during the course of the class.

This is my first Janice Hallett book, and most of the way I bounced off of it is that the writing doesn't feel like text chat. Everybody capitalizes sentences and ends with full stops. There's very few sentence fragments. Characters have a largely similar writing style, even when they range from ages 20 to 60. The writing was so stilted that I almost set it down several times. I looked up some reviews (which were almost all hugely positive) that suggested there were interesting twists later, so I pushed through to a painful and bewildering end.

Honestly, the author really needs to go read Gretchen McCulloch's Because Internet about the different ways people speak online, especially in generational senses. It'd also be great if only the emails and essays were business formal so that there could be different modalities of communication, but everybody sounds equally stilted in their private chats. There's a rare sprinkle of "OMG" and "FFS" thrown in (always capitalized) in a way that feels the author is trying too hard while holding a skateboard over their shoulder.

I am a huge sucker for telling a story through online artifacts, and so in my mind I compare this with other fiction that has done this much more effectively. I would recommend instead Sarah Pinsker's Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather short story or even the posts in Christine Love's don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story game or the text chat in Naomi Kritzer's Catfishing on CatNet novels. These all feel like real people writing online in ways that this novel did not.

I'm going to try to speedrun the rest of my grumps here.

The pacing is wild. It takes sixty percent of the book before you get any sense of what might be going on. To me, this doesn't feel like a proper mystery where the reader has any chance of understanding the whodunnit until it's brought directly to their attention with new details. There's often plenty of bread crumbs that make (some of) the reveals feel plausible, but there's just not enough here. Also, when the first half of the book is such low stakes academic squabbling, it's hard to care more deeply about it when you find out there's secret reasons behind some of it. Telling me for half the book that something more interesting has been going on secretly that I haven't seen yet is just not effective storytelling.

The descriptions of the way technology works big and small are ridiculous in ways that threw me off as a reader.

The politics are wild! This book has some discussion about environmentalism and ecology, and one might think there could be some good things to be concerned about, maybe around checks notes capitalism or global warming or oil pipelines or pollution. (spoilers but haha jk these are definitely not the environmental concerns of this story)

Sure, sure, there are some twists and reveals of things the reader may have guessed or in other cases had no way of knowing. I'll be kind and not spoil them here, but some of them are just wildly implausible and so disconnected from what the rest of the book is about that it makes the book feel scattered.

At any rate, not a fan, would not recommend.