"Six Students. One Murder. Can You Solve the Crime?" These words jump out from under the title on the book's cover. My own answer was a resounding "No!" For one thing, what IS the crime?!
Six students are admitted into a new yearlong Master's Program in Multimedia Art at Royal Hastings University in England. The tale is told through emails and group chats via an intranet/messaging system, for the most part. Sometimes the group chats are open to all the students and their instructor, Gela Nathaniel. Sometimes the messages are private. Sometimes we see diaries the students keep online.
The students are a diverse group in age, experience, and country of origin. From the start, rather than work together, they seem to squabble a lot. The youngest, Jem, is 21, fresh out of her bachelor's degree. She's a go-getter; very confident and headstrong. But at least she shows up. Some of the others are having issues with family, jobs or health.
The final assignment for the masters program is for the students to work together on a multimedia installation for a real business and to install it in the company's foyer for a reception for the company's guests. An outside examiner is to evaluate the students' work. His queries, as the program nears the end, make us aware that he thinks something bad may have happened to one of the students. But what?
The Examiner was sometimes hard for me to stick with. There were long spells where I didn't like any characters; at other times a couple of characters were more tolerable. So many surprises and twists in this story.
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