The Wall Street Journal has just released its annual list of best colleges, and the rankings are a bit different than last year’s. Little-known Babson College, which was No. 126 in 2022, now ranks second, sandwiched between Princeton and Stanford. The reason? The Journal’s metrics are now weighted more heavily toward post-college employment rates and salary impact.
Janice Hallett captures this shift in higher education with deadly acuity in The Examiner, in which a desperate art professor creates a new course in multi-media art “designed to bridge the gap between creative-arts education and the workplace.” She’s just trying to survive, but at what cost?
Besides being a satire of this new, commercialized academia, Hallett’s fifth novel is also a thorny murder mystery. It’s presented as a dossier of material relevant to the art course assembled by the eponymous examiner (an external overseer), who concludes that something very bad might have happened to one of the students.
The examiner’s clues come from the posts on an inter-group messaging system, essays, e-mails, and other communications that make up the narrative, an epistolary technique Hallett has used with a few variations since her first book, The Appeal. She is mischievously selective about which information to hold back, so that when she drops one of several bombs about people and events late in the game, you’re forced to abandon assumptions you’ve made along the way.
The six hand-picked students, enrolled in a one-year master’s program at a prestigious English university, seem like random choices in terms of age, previous education, and talent. It doesn’t take long to realize that something is off with the course, including a project in which the students collaborate with a tech company to get a taste of how clients operate in the real world. The company’s actual mission is as unclear as the reason for the odd makeup of the class.
Hallett again proves to be a master of the dysfunctional-group dynamic, which she deploys first to comic and eventually more sinister effect. The course plays out like a slow-motion multi-car pileup, starting with some slapstick quarrels and taking on weight and malevolence as it progresses.
Besides being a satire of this new, commercialized academia, Janice Hallett’s fifth novel is also a thorny murder mystery.
Try not to rush through the messaging format, because close reading will reveal many layers: eco-activism, industrial espionage, forays into physics and engineering, and a whiff of the paranormal. It’s possible that Hallett has slightly over-egged the omelet with intricacies of plot, which leads to the need for some extra clarification toward the end. But that’s minor. The Examiner is closer to the Saturday crossword puzzle than Monday’s; readers who are up for a challenge will find its complexity exhilarating.
More in the Monday-Tuesday range of crosswords is We Solve Murders, Richard Osman’s latest and the first in a new series. His many fans will be relieved to hear that it’s not a huge departure from his Thursday Murder Club books; the tone and formula are still classic Osman, but this iteration is a family affair. A former cop named Steve Wheeler and his bodyguard daughter-in-law, Amy, team up with her client, a Jackie Collins–esque writer under threat from a Russian oligarch, to solve a series of murders in which Amy could be the next victim. Steve, a bereaved widower and the character most easily transplanted from the cozy confines of The Thursday Murder Club, is taken way out of his comfort zone in this adventure, globe-trotting on private planes, shooting people (but only in the shoulder), and doing tequila shots with the ageless, zinger-slinging writer whose endless supply of “eighties money” takes them from a luxury resort in Saint Lucia to a hotel in Dubai.
It seems that Osman was itching to break out into the wider world, and he achieves that in what would have once been called a romp, but with all of his breezy drollness, knack for endearing characters, and satirical instincts in place. Influencers and dim-witted action-movie heroes might want to duck.
Fans of high-profile, semi-comic crime shows are in luck this month with new seasons of old favorites and a debut. The crew from Only Murders in the Building, goofy charm intact, reacted to the murder of the former stunt double for Charles Haden-Savage (Steve Martin) by starting a podcast about it; Slow Horses, fart jokes intact, opened with a bang and a feint involving a major character; and Bad Monkey plugged Vince Vaughn as a police detective bumped down to food inspector into mystery writer Carl Hiaasen’s broadly hilarious vision of crime, Florida-style, and just let him go.
Richard Osman’s many fans will be relieved to hear that his new book is not a huge departure from his Thursday Murder Club books.
But if you’re looking for something with more ballast, try a British show called Informer (2018), which finds new angles on the confidential-informant trope and the sometimes agonizing uncertainty of the South Asian immigrant experience. The role of the C.I., less officially known as a snitch, is so inherently nerve-racking that it’s possible to go through the motions and still generate suspense. But Informer, a BAFTA nominee for outstanding drama series in 2019, is more ambitious than that, boosted by the smashing performances of then newcomers Nabhaan Rizwan and Roger Nsengiyumva, as well as bravely ambiguous work by Paddy Considine and Bel Powley.
Gabriel Waters (Considine) and his newbie partner, Holly Morten (Powley), are members of a British counterterrorism police unit trying to gather information on the whereabouts of a terrorist rumored to be in London. They need fresh informants, so when a young British-Pakistani man named Raza Shar (Nabhaan Rizwan) gets into mild legal trouble for possession, they use leverage to make him their eyes and ears in the shady corners they can’t penetrate. Raza, a regular guy who’s smarter than his job at a packaging facility would indicate, turns out to have a gift for improv that extricates him from scary situations, often generated by Dadir Hassan, the brother of the unit’s recently murdered informant, played by Ngsengiyumva with quicksilver volatility.
As Gabriel keeps upping the risk factor for Raza, the handler’s behavior becomes erratic, to the dismay and bewilderment of his snitch and his partner.
Nabhaan Rizwan was a real find when Informer first aired, a nimble, quick-witted actor with a wide emotional range, and it must be said, a face the camera loves. His appeal, combined with the show’s skillful interweaving of several important plotlines, makes the last few episodes of Informer unbearably tense as the ground keeps shifting under him.
Lisa Henricksson writes a column about mystery books at AIR MAIL
