Janice Hallett — The Examiner (2024)

Preamble

If you’re interested in reading my academic work about detective and crime fiction (free PDFs available), check it out here. Or you can take a look at my short story collection of cosy mysteries featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!

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Review

I read this at the very tail end of 2024, when struck down with one of those flus that didn’t make me ill, per se, just indolent, and I read it in a day.

I’ve read many but not all of Hallett’s preceding books, which are of a type. (I didn’t review The Appeal here, but it was on my books of 2022 list.) There are a few other authors similarly wedded to a format (in the See Also list below), and I think they benefit from being spaced out rather than read in quick succession, somewhat unlike procedural and other formulaic detective/crime TV, which can happily be watched in more extended binges without particularly diminishing returns!

Hallett’s novels are constructed from bundles of evidence (in some cases literally, as in The Appeal) that ostensibly lay out the happenings for others to judge purely based on this evidence.

In this case, an external examiner—ah, be still my beating heart, and show us academic administration in all its frustrating and chaotic glory!—sits down to review the paperwork from a new university art course and flags to internal reviewers that he thinks one of the students has been murdered and others are covering it up. We get emails, message threads, and other paraphernalia from which to build our conclusions. These novels rely on our belief that we, as savvy readers of crime fiction, might be able to reconstruct the evidence and reach the right conclusion before any official investigator, or in this case before any official investigator is called.

As someone who works in university administration, yes, the overarching authenticity of the exchanges between academics, technicians, and professional services staff continued to be an amusing side note during the course of the book. I enjoyed the plot overall, and the cast of characters is reasonably well drawn, although the high stakes seem at times a little overwrought. The twists are effective. Who is dead? Probably not who you think. Why are some of the deceptions so effective? For a reason you almost certainly won’t spot (but let me know if you did!).

The plot detour from what might be petty jealousy and rage into something altogether more tangle seems deeply odd, but the two technological threats somehow parallel each other perfectly, and in a febrile and high-pressure environment we can all come to believe just about anything.

See also

These lists capture other stories and characters that I thought of as I was reading this piece. I won’t explain why, to avoid spoilers, but they’re associations and not ‘if you liked this, then you’ll love…’ recommendations!

• All other Janice Hallett novels
• Matt Wesolowski’s Six Stories series
• Lucy Foley’s location novels
• Carnacki, the Ghost-Finder (William Hope Hodgson)
• Ghosts: Being the Experiences of Flaxman Low (E and H Heron)
• Dirk Gently (novel and the two TV series)

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Take a look at my short story collection featuring Victorian “lady detective” Meinir Davies; order now!