Take a photo of a barcode or cover
concagh98 's review for:
The Examiner
by Janice Hallett
Starting with "The Appeal" Janice Hallett has successfully turned her whole gimmick of "a murder mystery written through text logs" into her own little subgenre and by "The Examiner" she has really gotten the hang of it. These feel so realistic because the format itself is extremely true to life: in the 21st century a lot of detective work is just sifting through mountains of emails and text logs, and the specific setting of this novel - the group chats of an MA group on a university intranet - will be familiar to anyone who's spent even a small amount of time in higher education.
It's notably stronger on characterization than "The Appeal" - all the cast are on the surface vaguely satirical "types" in the Agatha Christie school, but like Christie the novel is paced well enough that by the time the central mystery starts to ramp up they all feel like actual people who you vaguely care about. Without going into spoilers the plot ends up being significantly more far-fetched than her previous works but way this book is written, at a remove from the actual action and where events only became clear a while after the fact - means that the escalations don't feel like shocking swerves in the way they maybe ought to.
While when I read "The Appeal" I found myself thinking a lot about the potential pitfalls of this format, in this novel the advantages are very clear. The narrative sleights of hand and big twists feel real instead of like cheats, as everyone can and does make false assumptions about people and events when they are only ever described through text messages and emails. I suspect the way these twists are seeded and the way you can decode how the actual events of the novel are occurring in the background of the story we're reading will mean this novel will hold up much better on a re-read than many of its genre.
It's notably stronger on characterization than "The Appeal" - all the cast are on the surface vaguely satirical "types" in the Agatha Christie school, but like Christie the novel is paced well enough that by the time the central mystery starts to ramp up they all feel like actual people who you vaguely care about. Without going into spoilers the plot ends up being significantly more far-fetched than her previous works but way this book is written, at a remove from the actual action and where events only became clear a while after the fact - means that the escalations don't feel like shocking swerves in the way they maybe ought to.
While when I read "The Appeal" I found myself thinking a lot about the potential pitfalls of this format, in this novel the advantages are very clear. The narrative sleights of hand and big twists feel real instead of like cheats, as everyone can and does make false assumptions about people and events when they are only ever described through text messages and emails. I suspect the way these twists are seeded and the way you can decode how the actual events of the novel are occurring in the background of the story we're reading will mean this novel will hold up much better on a re-read than many of its genre.