I've thoroughly enjoyed all of Janice Hallett's previous crime books. The Examiner is, frankly, more of the same - and I'm happy with that!

You, the reader, are given a series of transcripts and have to work out what crime (if any) has been committed. You don't find out who the victim(s) is/are until reasonably far through the story. The characters are well realised (although a little similar to some of her others). The twists are shockingly good and will make you flick back to see if you could have spotted them.

Hallett is exquisite at building tension through the slow drip-drip-drip of reveals. OK, so the transcripts are a bit unrealistic but they make a good scaffold. While it might be nice to include user avatars on the WhatsApp messages, the characters' voices are unique enough to distinguish them easily.

Much like The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels, the book plays around with symbolism and the nature of faith. You may find yourself sympathising with the characters and then quickly recanting!

Technical Issues

Viper, the publisher, seem to have messed up the structure of this eBook. Despite being published in 2024, they're using an ancient and obsolete version of the Blitz ePub CSS which itself was archived back in 2020. As well as strange indents, there's a hard-coded 2em margin only on the right.

Accessibility is poor. All the abbreviations use the <abbr> element. But some kind of automated find-and-replace has mangled most of them. For example, the "Masters degree in Multimedia Art (Full-Time Programme)" is shortened to "MMAM(FTP)" and then given the nonsensical abbreviation of "Molecular Area Per Molecule (File Transfer Protocol)"!

Much like before I've written to them asking them to correct it.

Much like her previous novels - The Appeal and The Twyford Code - you have to be willing to suspend your disbelief a fair bit. Do people really talk like that when they don't know they're being recorded? Are mysterious notes ever really that clear? Probably not - but it is all rather good fun seeing the plot come together.

It also cheats just a little by having the transcriber give their opinion at key points. It keeps the story going, via a few red herrings, so I can't complain too much. There are lots of clues dotted around to keep track of, and a few proper gasp-out-loud moments.

The book is gorgeously typeset. The handwritten notes all use different fonts. Not only does it look luscious, it also brings a bit of life to the characters.

One thing to note - there were some accessibility issue with the book. Images of crucial evidence didn't have alt text and some of the emoji were poorly rendered. I wrote to the publisher and they fixed all the problems quickly. So it is worth checking if your eBook retailer has updated to the newer version.

The plot is a curious affair. A mixture of satanic-panic and murder mystery. It gets progressively darker and spookier - becoming rather twisted. The conclusion is pretty satisfying while leaving you with a few questions to mull over.

This is a fun mystery novel in a quirky style.

The schtick is similar to the first. We, the reader, are taken through an epistolary series of audio files - voice notes from a recently released convict. There's intrigue, murder, regret, and redemption. The story isn't as tangled as The Twyford Code - here's it is one main protagonist. While his memories wander back and forth through time, the story is relatively linear. There are some great cliffhangers, but nothing quite as dramatic as the previous book.

The code, such as it is, isn't overly complex:

So it is less about working out the murderer but more about detecting the code. If you do begin to work it out, there are some very satisfying pay-offs. There are some good twists and some lovely hidden references to classic children's books.

I felt compelled to scribble a few notes in the margins when I thought I found something, which was rather entertaining. I did go down a couple of slightly weird rabbit holes - which were either expert traps by the author or my imagination running away with me!

It isn't as infuriating as some mystery books (like the justifiably maligned Masquerade) and the coda provides all the answers if you can't be bothered to work them out.

A fun read. Not quite as compelling as The Appeal, but an entertaining enough mystery. Well plotted and rather surprising.

A murder mystery set in an amateur dramatics society is a bit Simon Brett but this has much more bite. The premise is that we are reading through the evidence in a legal case. All we see are the emails and text messages between various people caught up in a grisly death. There are a couple of lawyers reading along with us who occasionally pop in to have some Socratic dialogue about what we've just read. Yes, it is a wee bit contrived. The emails have slightly too much exposition - but it is a startlingly good device for keeping the plot moving. I stayed up far too late flicking back and forth trying to untangle the web.

Despite the constraints of the format, each character has a recognisable style of writing - from the slightly dimwitted villager to the malicious bitch, they are each painted vividly. As the story reaches its conclusion, a more senior lawyer steps in to ask us some questions - what have we spotted? Personally, I'd have liked these "clues" at the start of the book - but it is a rather clever way to make you pause and think about what you've just read.

By the end, the foreshadowing become apparent - and I was left gasping at how well plotted the story had been. The Greek Chorus of lawyers nudges the reader in the right direction. I certainly caught a couple of the big twists, and was rather satisfied with the ones I didn't.

A brilliant mystery novel that, for once, lives up to the hype.