Jack Glass

Jack Glass opens by telling us who the killer is, so the question is not whodunit but how and why. Across three murders committed by Glass, the novel plays with the conventions of crime fiction, including the country house killing and the locked room puzzle, while carrying the feel of classic science fiction from the mid-twentieth century.

Adam Roberts, whose earlier novels include Swiftly, New Model Army and Yellow Blue Tibia, uses these familiar patterns as a framework for experiment. He questions how readers approach both crime and science fiction, yet he keeps the story entertaining, with grisly scenes and a steady vein of dry humor. Each of the three murders is built as a gripping howdunnit.

By the end, the reader's sympathies have been pulled firmly toward the killer. The novel is set in a society whose structure forces hard questions about crime, punishment, power and freedom, and it asks them through a carefully constructed story.