Janice Hallett discusses The Examiner

Janice Hallett in conversation with Barbara Peters. Hallett discusses her latest novel, The Examiner.

Told in emails, text messages, and essays, this innovative page-turner follows a group of students in an art master’s program that goes dangerously awry, from the internationally bestselling “new queen of crime” (Electric Literature) Janice Hallett.

University professor Gela Nathaniel must make her new master’s program in multimedia art succeed. If it doesn’t, then Royal Hastings University will cut her funding and she’ll be out of the job she loves. The six students in this inaugural course will be key to that success…but how well has she selected the team?

The students include a talented young sculptor who is determined to graduate with top grades, a former gallery owner with limited artistic skills, a single mother more interested in a paycheck than homework, a people pleaser who struggles with technology, a marketing executive suffering from burnout, and a successful artist who seems rather overqualified for the program.

At the end of the academic year, when the examiner arrives to grade the students’ final project, he finds himself asking what happened. Because if someone in that course isn’t in mortal danger, then they are already dead. But who, and why?

He wants us to read through the students’ coursework, texts, message boards, and final essays to see if we can find the answers. Only one thing is certain: nothing about this course has been left to chance, and each of these students has their own very different agenda.

Janice Hallett is a former magazine editor, award-winning journalist, and government communications writer. She wrote articles and speeches for, among others, the Cabinet Office, Home Office, and Department for International Development. Her enthusiasm for travel has taken her around the world several times, from Madagascar to the Galapagos, Guatemala to Zimbabwe, Japan, Russia, and South Korea. A playwright and screenwriter, she penned the feminist Shakespearean stage comedy NetherBard and cowrote the feature film Retreat. She lives in London and is the author of The Examiner, The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, The Appeal, The Christmas Appeal, and The Twyford Code.