Plot Summary
Prologue
An external examiner overseeing a new Multimedia Art MA at Royal Hastings writes to the college administrators. He cannot make sense of what happened on the course. Despite access to Doodle message boards, diaries, emails, tutor reports, and WhatsApp caches, the final essays contradict each other on fundamental facts. One student may have disappeared.
Another may be dead. The examiner asks for help reviewing the documents, warning that if his worst fears are true, then someone on this course did not survive. He includes an academic year calendar, marking guidelines, and his correspondence with the college admins, arranging everything in chronological order from when the course began.
The opening establishes the novel's central conceit: we are reading a dossier assembled by an investigator trying to reconstruct events from documentary evidence. This epistolary frame creates immediate dramatic irony. The reader knows something terrible happened but not what, mirroring the examiner's position. The letter's tone, poised between professional detachment and barely suppressed alarm, signals that what follows will unravel the careful structures of academic oversight. The examiner's admission that he cannot quite work out what happened is an invitation to participate in the act of detection.
Six Strangers, One Studio
On September 26, 2023, six students gather at Royal Hastings for the inaugural Multimedia Art MA. Jem Badhuri,1 twenty-one and freshly graduated, is blind but fiercely independent, already familiarizing herself with the studio layout. Patrick Bright,2 a gentle Irishman in his fifties who runs an art supplies shop, nervously approaches his first degree.
Jonathan Danners,4 thirty-one, claims he sacrificed university years to family tragedy. Alyson Lang5 arrives late, the only established artist among them, winner of a 2013 Emerging Talent award. Ludya Parak,6 a freelance graphic designer and single mother, immediately clashes over the phone ban.
Cameron Wesley,7 a corporate marketing man recovering from burnout, barely engages. Gela Nathaniel,3 the tutor desperate to prove this course viable, announces Assignment One: design a logo for a fictional startup. Before the day ends, Alyson5 demands a keypad for after-hours access, Ludya6 refuses to surrender her phone, and the first cracks in the group's facade appear.
Hallett packs each introduction with information that will later prove significant. Jem's blindness conceals extraordinary compensatory abilities; Patrick's gentle manner masks decades of trauma; Jonathan's tragic backstory is largely fabricated. The course itself is a Potemkin village: Gela has handpicked these students not for their art but for their usefulness to a conspiracy. The tension between surface identities and hidden motives creates the novel's fundamental dramatic engine. Every character is performing a role, and the studio becomes a stage where multiple deceptions must be sustained simultaneously.
Fire in the Studio
On October 24, the group presents Assignment One. Jonathan4 has built a delicate paper cube on a resin base, ambitious but poorly executed. During the critique, Alyson5 stalks over to his model, insults both it and him, then produces a lighter and sets the paper cube on fire.
Patrick2 grabs the nearest extinguisher and douses the flames before the smoke detectors trigger. The room reels. Later, Gela3 sends Cameron7 a private message: his phone, with its military-grade facial recognition security, had shrieked an alarm earlier when someone tried to look at it in the tray. Alyson5 admits she created the fire as a diversion after she triggered the alarm by snooping at Cameron7's device.
The other students are left shaken, believing Alyson5 is dangerously unhinged. Only Gela,3 Jonathan,4 and Ludya6 know the truth: Alyson5 is actually Suzie,5 Jonathan4's wife, an AetherGen activist who panicked when she realized Cameron7 might not be what he seemed.
The fire scene crystallizes the novel's central mechanism: what appears to be one kind of event (an artist's dramatic act of criticism) is actually something entirely different (a diversion to cover espionage). This pattern will recur throughout the book. The moment also establishes Suzie's impulsiveness as a dangerous liability. Her instinct to create chaos rather than think strategically will later have catastrophic consequences. Meanwhile, Cameron's phone, introduced here as a curiosity, will become the story's most horrific plot device after his death.
Jem's Spreadsheet Accusation
Jem1 notices supplies vanishing from the storeroom whenever Alyson5 works overnight. She enlists Patrick,2 whose shop knowledge provides trade prices, and together they compile a spreadsheet documenting missing acrylic paints, plaster mix, resin, and canvases totaling over 125 pounds in a single week.
Jem1 emails Gela3 with her findings, certain Alyson5 is stocking a personal studio with college materials. Gela3 confronts the person she knows as Alyson,5 who confesses she has been shipping supplies to her sister, the real Alyson Lang,10 whose art career has stalled.
Gela3 dismisses Jem1's investigation, telling her the missing items were used by the BA group next door. Jem1 does not believe this explanation. She begins taking daily photographs of Alyson5's workstation to document attendance, suspecting something far more significant than petty theft is being concealed. The photographs will later become crucial evidence.
Jem's investigation reveals her character: methodical, persistent, and unwilling to accept comfortable lies. Her blindness, far from being a limitation, has trained her to notice patterns others miss. The spreadsheet represents a childlike faith in documentation, yet it also demonstrates that Jem sees more clearly than anyone else what is happening. Gela's dismissal of the accusation marks a turning point: she is now actively covering for the AetherGen operatives, sacrificing her professional ethics to protect a course that has become a vehicle for conspiracy. The real Alyson, mentioned here for the first time, will emerge as a key figure in the eventual unraveling.
Gela's Double Game Exposed
Behind the official Doodle communications, a parallel WhatsApp network operates. Messages between Gela,3 Jonathan,4 Suzie,5 and Ludya6 reveal the course is a front. Gela3 is being paid 40,000 pounds by AetherGen, with another 40,000 promised upon completion, to provide cover for their operation at RD8's Somerset facility.
Separately, Gela3 communicates with Cameron,7 who is not a burned-out executive but a private investigator hired by RD8 under Operation Kiss-kiss. Cameron7's employer is paying Gela3 50,000 pounds for access to the same course, to surveil the AetherGen unit. Gela3 is being paid by both sides.
She tells herself she is saving her department, which has lost all other MA programs. Meanwhile, she manipulates admissions: she blackmails Patrick2 into staying on the course by threatening to expose his decades-old VAT evasion, and she selects Jem1 partly because her blindness means she literally will not see what AetherGen is doing in the studio.
The revelation of Gela's financial arrangement with both AetherGen and RD8 transforms her from a stressed academic into a morally compromised mercenary. Her desperation to save her department has led her to host what amounts to a corporate espionage operation disguised as a university course. Yet Hallett resists easy condemnation. Gela's choices reflect real institutional pressures on arts education, where funding cuts force ethically dubious compromises. The fact that she is being paid by both sides makes her position precarious: she must ensure both operations succeed without either discovering the other. This structural vulnerability will prove fatal.
The Somerset Sourcing Trip
On January 16, 2024, the sourcing team drives to Thorney Coffin, RD8's archive facility in rural Somerset. Jonathan,4 Suzie,5 Ludya,6 Cameron,7 and Patrick2 are shown into a climate-controlled museum of vintage radios. While Patrick2 and Cameron7 explore the exhibits, Jonathan4 and Ludya6 create a diversion.
Suzie5 slips through a hidden door using codes obtained from an alcoholic insider at RD8. She has been sent to photograph atmospheric defense technology developed by RD8, which Jonathan4 believes killed his mother and disabled his sister. But the insider gave wrong directions. Suzie5 turns left instead of right and steals an old radio unit from its own sealed room.
The unit is not the atmospheric weapon they sought; it is the radio phase of the Dead Hand system, a Cold War doomsday device. Cameras record nothing. The theft goes unnoticed until later. At the motel that evening, Jem1's booking change traps them all in one family room.
The Somerset trip is the novel's fulcrum. Every subsequent event cascades from this single wrong turn. The directional error (left instead of right) is the kind of mundane mistake that changes everything, a reminder that even sophisticated conspiracies can be undone by human fallibility. The Dead Hand radio phase, preserved in its own temperature-controlled room, is introduced as an object of mystery. Its true nature as a doomsday device capable of triggering nuclear launches adds apocalyptic stakes to what has so far been a story of academic intrigue. Patrick's presence as the innocent bystander will make him the inadvertent catalyst for murder.
The Iron and the Phone
At the Travel Inn, the discovery that Jem1 has booked them into one family room with a double bed and children's bunks ignites fury. Cameron7 receives a call from Mae Blackwell9 at RD8, who has learned the radio unit is missing and orders him to retrieve it immediately. He confronts the group. Suzie5 pulls the stolen radio from her coat.
Cameron7 tries to grab it from Ludya,6 who refuses to release it. Suzie5 lunges to help but slips and falls. Patrick,2 emerging from the bathroom and seeing Cameron7's arm raised, believes Ludya6 is being attacked. He grabs the room's iron and strikes Cameron7 across the back of the head.
Cameron7 collapses, dead before he hits the floor. In the stunned silence, Cameron's phone erupts with a shrieking alarm. Ludya6 reads the screen: military-grade security requiring the owner's face to be scanned every five minutes, or police are automatically dialed. Suzie5 holds the phone to Cameron7's dead face. The alarm stops.
This sequence transforms the novel from a clever academic thriller into something darker and more existential. Patrick's act is instinctive, born of decades of guilt over his failure to save his friend Finn in 1988. He finally acts decisively, and that action creates an irreversible catastrophe. The phone, which has been established as a curiosity since the fire incident, becomes a horrific plot device: a technological leash that will bind the group to Cameron's corpse for months. The five-minute countdown imposes a brutal rhythm on everything that follows, transforming the conspirators into prisoners of the very technology they sought to expose.
The Body in Transit
The group cannot call an ambulance. Cameron7 was a private investigator; his messages reveal he worked for RD8 and had been tracking AetherGen from the start. Gela3 knew and was being paid. Jonathan4 takes command. They wrap Cameron7's body in the tunnel fabric, which Jem1 and Gela3 had stored by the rear doors, smearing it with blood and dirt.
The fabric is stuffed in the bins. They drive back to London with the corpse, arriving at Royal Hastings in the early hours to drop off the salvage bags as planned. Jonathan4 and Suzie5 take Cameron7 to their rented house, placing him in a freezer to preserve his face for the phone.
Ludya6 messages contacts from Patrick2's phone to create an alibi. Patrick2 is told to carry on as normal at the studio and keep Jem1 distracted. The next morning, Griff12 the technician finds the bloodied fabric in the bins and complains to Gela,3 noting it reminded him of a student's dead pig incident from years earlier.
The cover-up's mechanics reveal how ordinary people can become complicit in extraordinary crimes through incremental decisions. Each character rationalizes their participation: Jonathan sees leadership as his duty, Ludya fears for her children, Patrick is paralyzed by guilt and gratitude, Suzie alone seems capable of the grim practical work of preserving the corpse. The bloodied fabric, discovered by Griff, introduces an element of mundane horror. Gela's decision to retrieve and clean the fabric rather than report it marks her transition from compromised academic to active participant in a conspiracy to conceal death.
The Voice Broadcasts
Jem1 finds the stolen radio hidden in the studio cupboard. Enthralled by its vintage design, she and Patrick2 wire a plug to it. When switched on, the radio broadcasts only white noise until, at exactly 5 p.m. each day, a distorted voice emerges: a man pleading for help, saying he is trapped in darkness, floating, unable to move.
The voice says something different each time. Patrick2 is shaken; Jonathan4 becomes obsessed, researching Edison and Tesla's experiments with machines to contact the dead. He begins to believe the radio tunes into a frequency where Cameron7's trapped consciousness now exists. Only Jem1 knows the truth.
During Assignment One, she had recorded Cameron7 improvising the voice of a trapped sea creature as a prank. She distorted the recording, hid it on a chip, and planted it in the radio's circuit board. Her goal was to create a disruption that would punish the group for dismissing her ideas. She had no idea Cameron7 was dead.
Jem's prank is the novel's most audacious twist. What everyone interprets as a supernatural phenomenon is actually an elaborate piece of performance art by the student everyone underestimated. Her motivation is psychologically acute: unable to make her voice heard in a room full of older, more confident people, she uses Cameron's voice instead. The irony is devastating. Cameron, silenced by death, speaks daily to his killers through a recording he never knew would be used this way. Jonathan's descent into occult obsession is both a grief response and a displacement of guilt, transforming the radio from stolen evidence into a sacred object.
Suzie Disappears from View
After Somerset, Suzie5 stops attending the studio. She is trapped at the rented house with Cameron7's body, holding the phone to his face every five minutes, day and night. When Jem1 asks where Alyson5 is, the others claim she is working overnight or has a new commission. Gela3 joins the deception, telling Jem1 she has seen Alyson5 recently.
Ludya6 completes Alyson5's coursework assignments, submitting them under her name. On Doodle, someone (Jonathan4) continues posting as Alyson.5 Jem1 is not fooled. She photographs Alyson5's workstation daily and proves it remains untouched.
When she asks pointed questions, Jonathan4 tells her Alyson5 self-identifies under that name and her real identity is none of anyone else's business. Gela3 awards the absent Suzie5 high grades, including an A for an animation Ludya6 actually made. The fiction of six students must be maintained for the course to pass its external examination.
Suzie's disappearance is the novel's most sustained act of collective gaslighting. Jem, the one person who can prove Alyson is gone, is systematically told she is wrong by people who know she is right. This creates a peculiar form of psychological abuse, exploiting Jem's youth and disability to dismiss her observations. Yet Jem refuses to accept the official narrative. Her daily photographs represent an alternative documentary record, a counternarrative to the group's lies. The fact that Suzie is simultaneously the most absent person and the one enduring the most grueling ordeal (the five-minute ritual with Cameron's corpse) creates a dark symmetry.
Jem Visits Guildford
Jem1 convinces her father to drive to ReMerge studios in Guildford, where she has found the real Alyson Lang10's workspace. The woman who greets her is not the Alyson5 from the course. She is slimmer, gentler, and has no memory of ever meeting Jem.1 When Jem1 explains the situation, the real Alyson10 sighs and admits her sister Suzie5 has been using her identity.
Suzie5 desperately wanted to do the MA but did not think she would be accepted without her sister's reputation. The real Alyson10 has been supplying artwork that Suzie5 submitted as her own. But Alyson10 is now deeply worried. Suzie5 stopped taking calls months ago.
Jonathan4 told her not to contact them anymore, saying they were working on something that could change the world. As Jem1 leaves, Alyson10 asks if Suzie5 ever mentioned AetherGen, the climate protest group with a new, more radical leader. She fears Suzie5 may be under someone's dangerous influence.
The Guildford visit is Jem's moment of vindication. The real Alyson's quiet worry contrasts with the aggressive persona Suzie performed on the course. The revelation complicates the moral calculus: Suzie is not simply an impostor but a woman who believed she needed her sister's reputation to pursue something she valued. Alyson's mention of AetherGen introduces the political dimension explicitly for the first time in Jem's narrative. The phrase 'under someone's spell' is ironic; Suzie is the one who has been holding Cameron's face to a phone for months, and it is the group, not Jem, who has been under a collective delusion.
The Danners Gallery Lies
Jem1 accompanies her father on a business trip to Gloucester and visits the Danners Gallery. The assistant manager, Barbara, shows her around. Jem1 asks about Jonathan4's father and about Jonathan4 himself, claiming she read about the gallery online. Barbara reveals that Jonathan4's mother and sister died two years ago, not ten as he claimed.
He completed a Bachelor's degree at Imperial over a decade ago. He is married to a woman named Suzie.5 And he has never been remotely interested in art or the gallery; his field is climate science.
Jonathan4's entire backstory, the foundation of his identity on the course, is a fabrication designed to generate sympathy and explain his presence. Jem1 leaves shaken but vindicated: her suspicions were correct, and the scale of deception is larger than even she imagined. She does not yet understand why Jonathan4 needed the false identity, or what AetherGen intends.
Jem's detective work culminates in a scene that recasts everything we know about Jonathan. His story of sacrifice and tragedy was a performance, but the real facts are perhaps more disturbing: his mother and sister did die, just recently enough that the grief is still raw. His activism is motivated by personal loss, not abstract ideology. The lies he told were not random; they were calibrated to make him seem harmless and sympathetic while concealing his true purpose. Barbara's offhand mention of climate science is the key that unlocks the conspiracy's nature. Jem, the blind student who was supposed to see nothing, has seen everything.
Resin and the Frozen Dead
The freezer holding Cameron7's body begins to fail. Suzie5 cannot keep the phone active if the face decomposes. Patrick,2 who has been experimenting with resin for his assignments, proposes a solution. He buys a saw, drying powder, and industrial epoxy.
Working with Jonathan4 and Suzie,5 he severs Cameron7's frozen head, packs it in silica to desiccate it, then embeds it in a clear resin block with the phone strapped to the front so the facial recognition sensor can see the eyes continuously. They also preserve Cameron7's fingers in smaller resin cubes, in case the fingerprints are needed for biometric locks.
The rest of the body is driven to Birling Gap, where Jonathan4 and Patrick2 carry it down treacherous cliff paths and hide it among rocks, waiting for the tide to take it. Patrick2 spends over 300 pounds of his own money on supplies, but Jonathan4 tells him there is no reimbursement; he will get his share when they sell the radio technology. Patrick2 realizes he is trapped.
The resin preservation sequence is the novel's most visceral horror. What began as Patrick's gentle retirement plan (preserving wedding flowers in resin) has been perverted into a grotesque method of body disposal. The transformation of Cameron from person to object, from corpse to security dongle, represents the ultimate dehumanization. Patrick's journey from accidental killer to active participant in dismemberment charts the incremental erosion of moral boundaries. His realization that Jonathan never intended to pay him, that he is being used and discarded, mirrors Cameron's own fate. The Birling Gap disposal, with its echoes of Patrick's childhood memory of Finn's body in the sea, closes a psychological circle.
The RD8 Event Night
On May 30, 2024, the group assembles the installation at RD8 headquarters: a fabric tunnel decorated with painted components, leading to Jem1's clay head sculpture. Hidden inside the hollow head are the resin block containing Cameron7's preserved face and the old radio unit.
Jonathan4 plans to incinerate everything after the event. But the external examiner, Ben Sketcher,8 arrives. Jem1 had invited him. When Jonathan,4 Suzie,5 and Ludya6 see Ben,8 their faces drain. He is not the examiner. He is their AetherGen leader, a hacker who has been tracking them since they went rogue with the stolen unit.
The three flee immediately, abandoning the installation and the evidence. Gela,3 suspicious about what the others put inside the head, opens it during the event and recoils in horror at the sight of Cameron7's face staring from the resin block.
During the CEO's presentation, Jem,1 still unaware of the block's contents, retrieves it from the head, intending to save it from incineration. The lights come up. Guests see Jem1 holding what they assume is a Damien Hirst-style artwork and applaud.
The event night is structured as a series of escalating confrontations. Ben's arrival functions as an unexpected climax: the AetherGen leader has been posing as the external examiner all along, accessing Doodle archives to track his errant unit. His appearance at RD8 triggers the flight response the group has been preparing for months. Gela's discovery of the resin block is her moment of full moral reckoning; she can no longer pretend the course is merely academically compromised. The audience's applause for Jem's unintentional performance art creates the novel's most bitter irony: Cameron's desecrated body, intended for secret disposal, becomes public spectacle, interpreted as a commentary on technology. Only Jem remains oblivious to the horror she holds.
The Incinerator's Final Witness
After the presentation, Patrick2 tells Jem1 he will stop Ben8 from taking the radio unit. He enters the incinerator building where Ben8 has fired up the industrial furnace. Patrick2's final essay, submitted later, reveals what happened: he created a diversion, just as he did decades ago when he pushed his friend Finn off a ferry to escape Irish paramilitaries.
This time, he does not run. He confronts Ben8 inside the incinerator block. Only one person walks out. Gela3 leads Jem1 safely to her father's waiting car. Later, RD8 notes that Patrick2 signed in but never signed out, while someone used Cameron7's preserved fingerprint to sign in and out through the biometric gate.
When the incinerator cools, fragments of human bone are found. Patrick2 messages Jem1 weeks later from a withheld number, admitting he listens to the radio every day at the same time, the scorpion paperweight beside him, its sting poised to strike, a permanent reminder of what he has done. He is closer to home now, painting and sketching, but they can never stay in touch.
The incinerator sequence offers an ambiguous resolution. Whether Patrick or Ben survived, or both died, is deliberately unclear. Patrick's final message suggests he escaped, but the bone fragments and the unsigned exit imply otherwise. This ambiguity serves the novel's thematic interest in identity and erasure. Patrick has spent his life running from one crime; now he faces a second. His return to art, the dream that brought him to the course, is achieved at terrible cost. The scorpion paperweight, one of seven he made, becomes a memento mori, its poised sting representing both guilt and the impossibility of forgetting. The novel ends not with justice but with a kind of exhausted truce between those who survived.
Epilogue
The real external examiner, Philippa Moreton, finally accesses the Doodle files. She pieces together what happened, confirming that Ben Sketcher8 was an AetherGen operative who hacked into the system to track his missing unit.
Three AetherGen members are arrested: Jonathan4 and Suzie5 receive ten-year sentences for trespass, cyber-fraud, and criminal damage; Ludya6 gets a suspended sentence for cooperating with authorities. Cameron7's death is officially recorded as occurring on a covert operation. Gela3 submits grades: Jem1 earns a Distinction, Patrick2 a Merit, Jonathan4 and Suzie5 Merits, Ludya6 a Pass, and Cameron7 a discretionary pass.
The course is approved for the following year. Jem1 launches her soundscape business. Patrick2 may have returned to Ireland, or he may have died in the incinerator. Philippa notes that any investigation would expose RD8's secret technology, so officially, nothing unusual happened on the inaugural Multimedia Art MA.
Philippa Moreton's resolution is a study in institutional complicity. Her breezy acceptance that nothing unusual happened, that the grades can simply be submitted, that next year's course can proceed, exposes how systems absorb atrocity by refusing to look at it directly. The real examiner is a more honest figure than Ben Sketcher, but her function is the same: to close the file, to make the story manageable. The police investigation fizzles because RD8's secrets must be protected. The AetherGen members are punished not for murder or body desecration but for trespass and fraud, a legal sleight of hand that buries the true crimes. Jem's triumph, her Distinction and new business, is the novel's one uncomplicated victory, earned through her refusal to accept anyone else's version of reality.
Analysis
The Examiner is a novel about the stories we tell to survive and the physical evidence that eventually contradicts them. Hallett structures her narrative as an archive, a collection of documents that multiple readers (Ben Sketcher,8 Philippa Moreton, the actual reader) must interpret. This epistolary form dramatizes the act of meaning-making itself. Every document is a performance: the students' Doodle messages perform their cover identities, their WhatsApp chats reveal their conspiracies, their long essays attempt to impose retrospective coherence on chaos. The novel asks whether truth can ever be extracted from such layered performances, or whether the archive always reflects the interests of those who compile it.
The central theme is teamwork as a mechanism of moral diffusion. The MA course is explicitly designed to teach collaborative skills, and the AetherGen unit functions as a team within that team. But when Cameron7 dies, the same collaborative instincts that should produce art become the machinery of atrocity. Each character can rationalize their role: Jonathan4 gives orders, Ludya6 handles technology, Suzie5 performs the intimate horror, Patrick2 provides material solutions. No single person feels responsible for the whole. This is the banality of evil rendered in the register of an academic bureaucracy.
Jem1's blindness is the novel's most sophisticated metaphor. She cannot see, yet she perceives more than anyone else because she trusts evidence over performance. Her refusal to identify as disabled is not denial but a radical assertion of self-definition against institutional categorization. She is the only character who consistently says what she means, and her prank with the recording, while destructive, is also the novel's most honest act of communication: she used someone else's voice because the group would not listen to her own. That this prank accidentally saved the world (by disabling the Dead Hand) is the novel's final, sly joke about the value of art.
Review Summary
The Examiner receives mixed reviews, with many praising Hallett's innovative epistolary style and intricate plot twists. Readers appreciate the engaging puzzle-like narrative and diverse characters, though some find it convoluted and slow-paced. The book's unique format, combining emails, texts, and essays, is both lauded and criticized. While some reviewers consider it Hallett's best work yet, others feel it falls short of her previous novels. Overall, it's described as a captivating, if divisive, mystery that challenges readers to piece together clues.
People Also Read
Characters
Jemisha Badhuri
Blind art student and investigatorA twenty-one-year-old sculptor and sound artist with a First in Fine Art from West Middlesex. Jem has been blind since birth but does not identify as disabled, compensating through extraordinary spatial memory, echolocation-like abilities, and an acute sensitivity to voices, footsteps, and smells. She is ambitious, mischievous, and ruthlessly honest, unwilling to accept comfortable lies. Her family, particularly her father, provides constant support, driving her everywhere and helping with inaccessible tasks. Jem's determination to be seen as capable leads her to refuse special consideration forms and to pursue her suspicions about Alyson5's disappearance with methodical persistence. Her talent for sound and clay is genuine and exceptional. Beneath her confident exterior, she struggles with the social dynamics of a group where everyone is older and more experienced, leading her to use disruption as a tool to make her voice heard.
Patrick Bright
Art shop owner with a pastA man in his fifties who has run an art supplies shop near Leicester Square for decades. Patrick is gentle, kind, and deeply haunted by a crime he committed in 1988 in Ireland, when he pushed his friend Finn off a ferry to escape paramilitaries who had forced them into drug smuggling. He has lived under a false identity ever since, too afraid to return home. He joins the MA hoping to rediscover his love of sketching and retire to Schull. Patrick is a people-pleaser who avoids conflict at all costs, a trait that makes him both likeable and ultimately dangerous. His instinct to protect others, born of lifelong guilt, leads him to kill Cameron7. Underneath his mild exterior, he possesses a capacity for decisive, violent action that surprises even himself. His discovery of resin art becomes tragically significant.
Gela Nathaniel
Tutor compromised by desperationA long-serving art tutor at Royal Hastings whose entire department has been decimated by funding cuts. All her previous MA courses have been discontinued. The Multimedia Art MA is her last chance to prove the viability of arts education at the institution. Gela is pragmatic, charming, and willing to compromise her ethics to save her career. She recruits students strategically, selecting Jem1 for her blindness (hoping she will not see the conspiracy), Patrick2 for his vulnerability (which she exploits through blackmail), and Cameron7 for his corporate credentials. She accepts payments from both AetherGen and RD8, playing both sides while convincing herself she is serving a greater good. Her relationship with Cameron7, formed when she taught art therapy at The Sanctuary rehab facility, adds a layer of genuine emotional entanglement to her financial corruption.
Jonathan Danners
AetherGen activist as project leaderA climate scientist in his thirties who poses as an aspiring artist on the MA. Jonathan is married to Suzie5, though they pretend to be strangers having an affair. His mother worked at RD8 in the 1980s and was exposed to the atmospheric defense technology that eventually killed her and caused his sister's severe disabilities. His activism is intensely personal. On the course, he presents himself as a man who sacrificed his education to care for dying family members, a story that is partially true but chronologically manipulated. As project leader, he is calm, decisive, and increasingly unhinged after Cameron7's death. His scientific training leads him to approach the radio voice as a research problem, developing elaborate theories about consciousness transmission that serve to rationalize his inability to dispose of the evidence.
Suzie Danners (posing as Alyson Lang)
Impostor artist and AetherGen operativeAn engineer and AetherGen activist who assumes her sister Alyson10's identity to enroll in the MA. Suzie was rescued as a toddler from a Chinese rubbish tip and adopted by British aid workers. Her early experiences of survival have made her impulsive, aggressive, and incapable of backing down from confrontation. She is the course's disruptive force, openly rude to technicians, demanding special treatment, and creating chaos as a diversion tactic. Behind the scenes, she is the only person psychologically capable of the grueling work of keeping Cameron's phone activated against his dead face for months. Her sister Alyson10, the real artist, supplies the coursework Suzie submits. Suzie's impulsiveness, the trait that helped her survive childhood, becomes catastrophic when she steals the wrong item from Thorney Coffin.
Ludya Parak
Reluctant AetherGen tech expertA freelance graphic designer and single mother of two young children. Ludya joined AetherGen out of genuine climate anxiety and concern for her children's future. She is AetherGen's technical specialist, responsible for cracking RD8's security codes. On the course, she presents as a chaotic, perpetually late student who submits special consideration forms for every assignment. In reality, she is overwhelmed by the impossible demands of her triple life: mother, activist, and fake student. She accepts payment from Jem1 to complete a 2D assignment, seeing it as practical rather than unethical. After Cameron7's death, she refuses to participate in the body-preservation ritual, drawing a line that eventually leads her to cooperate with authorities. Her suspended sentence reflects her partial moral recovery.
Cameron Wesley
Corporate PI posing as studentA former soldier turned private investigator, hired by RD8 to infiltrate the MA course and surveil the AetherGen operatives. Cameron presents himself as a marketing executive recovering from burnout, a cover story that explains his sporadic attendance and poor academic performance. He met Gela3 at The Sanctuary, where she taught art therapy, and their relationship has since become professionally entangled. Cameron carries a phone with military-grade facial recognition security, a holdover from his intelligence work. He is competent but overconfident, believing he can manage the AetherGen threat without backup. His attempt to retrieve the stolen radio unit at the motel triggers the fatal confrontation. After his death, his phone becomes the mechanism that traps his killers in an ongoing nightmare.
Ben Sketcher
AetherGen leader as false examinerThe new leader of AetherGen, who took control of the organization after Jonathan4, Suzie5, and Ludya6 went rogue with the stolen radio unit. Ben is a skilled hacker who infiltrates Royal Hastings' examination system by posing as the external examiner. He accesses all Doodle archives, reads the students' final essays, and manipulates administrators to track his missing operatives. His appearance at the RD8 event triggers the final confrontation. His interest in the radio unit is both ideological and financial: he recognizes its value and intends to sell it to fund AetherGen's future operations. His fate after entering the incinerator with Patrick2 remains ambiguous.
Mae Blackwell
RD8 executive managing secretsAn executive at RD8 Systems who oversees the company's collaboration with the MA course. Mae knows the AetherGen operatives are on the course and has been feeding them a decoy unit to find, intending to humiliate them when they try to expose it. She hires Cameron7 to monitor the group and maintain RD8's security. When Suzie5 steals the wrong unit (the Dead Hand radio phase), Mae's priorities shift dramatically. She pressures Cameron7 to retrieve it at all costs, a demand that directly leads to the motel room confrontation. Her corporate loyalty to RD8 outweighs any concern for the students or their safety.
Alyson Lang (the real artist)
Suize's sister and artwork supplierThe genuine Alyson Lang, a professional artist who won an Emerging Talent Award in 2013. She agreed to let her sister Suzie5 use her identity to enroll in the MA, supplying the artwork that Suzie5 submitted as her own. Alyson's motivations are a mix of sisterly loyalty and financial need; Suzie5 promised to help fund her next exhibition. When Jem1 visits her Guildford studio, Alyson's genuine worry about Suzie5's disappearance becomes evident. She is physically different from Suzie5 (slimmer, gentler), which explains why the course members assumed Suzie5 had simply lost weight since the old photographs online. Alyson's concern about AetherGen's new leadership reveals the limits of her knowledge about what her sister was actually doing.
Hannah O'Donnell
Course administrator and witnessThe administrator for the Media Arts Department who manages Doodle, collects diversity forms, and coordinates the examination process. Hannah is conscientious and persistent, repeatedly asking Gela3 for the students' diversity forms which Gela3 never submits. She overhears the radio broadcast one evening and is disturbed by it. Later, she provides information to both Ben Sketcher8 and Philippa Moreton, becoming an unwitting facilitator of the investigation.
Griff
Observant studio technicianThe head technician in the Media Arts building, described as gruff but professional. Griff notices the bloodied fabric in the bins, the excessive resin usage, and the students' suspicious behavior around the radio. He reports these anomalies to Gela3, who consistently downplays them. His sculptures in the corridor suggest he is a talented artist himself, adding depth to his resentment of students who treat him as menial staff.
Plot Devices
Doodle Message System
Epistolary documentary evidence hubRoyal Hastings' intranet and messaging system that captures all course communications. Doodle hosts message boards, private chats, diaries, and coursework submissions. Students are required to use it for all college matters, creating an archive that later becomes the primary source for reconstructing events. The diary function locks entries after midnight, preventing retroactive editing. Crucially, the system is accessible to administrators and, with the right credentials, to external examiners. Ben Sketcher8 exploits this to track his missing AetherGen unit. The promise that Doodle data is permanently deleted after the course ends creates urgency: the truth must be extracted before the digital record vanishes.
Cameron's Security Phone
Corpse-preservation timer mechanismA smartphone with military-grade biometric security requiring the owner's face to be scanned every five minutes. If the face is not recognized, the phone triggers an alert to the owner's office, which will then contact authorities. After Cameron7's death, this feature becomes a trap: the group must keep his face preserved and present the phone to it every five minutes, day and night, for months. This requires storing his body in a freezer, then later preserving his head in resin with the phone strapped to the block. The phone also contains Cameron7's communications with Mae Blackwell9 and Gela3, revealing the full scope of RD8's surveillance operation. Suzie5 impersonates Cameron7 via text to maintain the illusion that he is alive and on another assignment.
The Dead Hand Radio Phase
Stolen doomsday device as MacGuffinA vintage radio unit kept in a climate-controlled room at RD8's Thorney Coffin facility. It appears to be an old wireless set but is actually the radio phase of the Dead Hand system, a Cold War doomsday mechanism designed to automatically launch nuclear missiles if it detects no human interaction for a set period. The unit was intended to scan radio frequencies for signs of life after a nuclear attack. When Suzie5 steals it (mistaking it for atmospheric defense technology), she removes it from its magnetic plinth, cutting its power. Patrick2's rewiring reactivates it. Jem1's hidden recording chip, planted as a prank, neutralizes its original function by overriding the circuit. The unit becomes the object everyone wants: AetherGen to expose or sell, RD8 to recover, and Ben Sketcher8 to monetize for his organization.
Jem's Hidden Voice Recording
Prank that fooled everyoneDuring Assignment One, Jem1 recorded Cameron7 improvising the voice of a trapped sea creature as a joke. Months later, after finding the stolen radio, she distorted the recording, randomized its playback, and hid it on a chip planted in the radio's circuit board. Every day at 5 p.m., the radio broadcast Cameron7's voice pleading for help from the darkness, claiming to be trapped and floating. The voice said something different each time, creating the illusion of a live broadcast. Jem1's intention was to create a disruption that would embarrass the group for dismissing her ideas. She had no knowledge of Cameron7's death. The recording unintentionally became the mechanism that convinced Jonathan4 the radio could contact the dead, driving his obsessive behavior. Jem1's chip also accidentally disabled the Dead Hand's original triggering circuit, potentially preventing a catastrophic automated response.
Epoxy Resin Preservation
Body disposal and biometric preservationPatrick2 learns to work with epoxy resin during Assignment Four, making paperweights with dead scorpions suspended inside. He discovers that organic matter can be preserved in resin if first dried in silica powder. When the freezer containing Cameron7's body begins to fail, Patrick2 applies this technique at horrifying scale. He severs Cameron7's head, desiccates it, and embeds it in a large clear resin block with the phone strapped to the front so the facial recognition can still scan the eyes. He also preserves Cameron7's fingers in smaller resin cubes for fingerprint access. The technique works temporarily, but organic matter of this density will eventually rot inside the resin. The seven scorpion paperweights Patrick2 distributed, including the one poised to strike (given to the person he saw as most dangerous), become symbolic tokens of guilt and complicity.
Download PDF
Download EPUB
.epub digital book format is ideal for reading ebooks on phones, tablets, and e-readers.
