Sara-Jayne Townsend is a published crime and horror writer and likes books in which someone dies horribly. She is founder and Chair Person of the T Party Writers’ Group. http://sarajaynetownsend.weebly.com/
The Multimedia Arts MA Course at Royal Hastings College is hiding a murderer – but who was the victim?
A crime novel with a difference, this intriguing mystery is presented in the form of a collection of notes, messages between students and the course tutor, and extracts from assignments for the duration of the academic year.
It begins with a message to the reader, from the Examiner, which ends: “if my worst fears are true, then one of the students on this course is dead”. A couple of pages later, the same examiner messages another examiner stating that if “something awful” happened to one of the students, then “everyone else is covering it up”.
And so the challenge is set for the reader: what happened during this course? Who died, and why is everyone else trying to hide it? I was drawn in immediately.
The unusual format of the novel takes a bit of getting used to. In the first few pages, we are introduced to the six students on the Multimedia Arts MA course at Royal Hastings, University of London, through introductory documents at the start of the academic year, and a series of messages from the university’s in-house messaging system, Doodle. It’s established early on that this group of students are all difficult personalities. It’s not long before they are all using the messaging system to complain – about the staff; about the structure of the course; about the fact that the art room requires a key instead of an electronic code. None of them are particularly likeable, and most of them appear to have ulterior motives to signing up for the course. Personality clashes between the students abound – but which of them has a motive for murder?
In many ways, this is a classic locked-room mystery, with a finite number of suspects, all of whom might have a motive. Anyone who fancies themselves as an armchair detective will love the way this book interacts with the reader, inviting then to solve the mystery.
But the book is so much more than that. Just at the point when you might think you’ve solved the mystery, a couple of devastating twists are thrown into the mix that make you realise just how clever this novel actually is.
Fans of all crime genres will love this ingeniously-constructed, highly original novel.
