Jack Glass

By: Adam Roberts

Narrated by: Elliot Chapman

Length: 13 hrs and 32 mins

Publisher's Summary

Winner of the Bsfa Award for Best Novel

Jack Glass is the murderer. We know this from the start. Yet as this extraordinary novel tells the story of three murders committed by Glass, the listener will be surprised to find out that it was Glass who was the killer and how he did it. And by the end of the book, our sympathies for the killer are fully engaged.

Riffing on the tropes of crime fiction (the country house murder, the locked room mystery) and imbued with the feel of golden age sci-fi, Jack Glass is another bravura performance from Roberts. Whatever games he plays with the genre, whatever questions he asks of the listener, Roberts never loses sight of the need to entertain - and Jack Glass has some wonderfully gruesome moments, is built around three gripping whodunits and comes with liberal doses of sly humour.

Roberts invites us to have fun and tricks us into thinking about both crime and sci-fi via a beautifully structured novel set in a society whose depiction challenges notions of crime, punishment, power and freedom. It is an extraordinary novel.

©2017 Adam Roberts (P)2017 Audible, Ltd.

unusual and interesting

I really enjoyed this book. It's a great combination of dystopian science fiction and locked room mystery. The science parts are interesting enough to make you think it could be possible and the mystery parts have you trying out multiple scenarios. My only slight reservation is that the MC were not very likeable but that was also kind of the point. The narrator also did a great job and seemed to be enjoying the story as well.

Ddn't finish

Well I listened to the first section and did not want to continue with the rest of this book - maybe sometime in the future

Good start that then goes nowhere

The story starts well but then slows down, drags out for the rest of the book and then seems to go nowhere in the end.

Not for me

I did not like this book. There were a lot of unnecessarily descriptive scenes and boring dialogs, which added nothing to the main story line. The story also didn’t quite work in my opinion, I lost interest very quickly and found myself having no interest whatsoever in what would happen next. The main characters were boring, two-dimensional and quite improbable. The personality of Jack Glass could have been explored much better in my opinion.

However, the author had created a very interesting world, I found myself wanting to find more about it, rather than having to get back to the story. I felt that the world is capable of so many potential other, more engaging stories, hence I give it 2 stars.

The narration was very good.