Jack Glass

You can also read this review of Jack Glass over at my blog Be More Book

I've given it 4, but it's more a 3.5.

Important point number one... I pretty much chose to buy this book because of the front cover. It's just gorgeous!

The book is laid out in 3 sections – In the Box, The FTL Murders and The Impossible Gun. Jack Glass is involved in all three of the sections and it's up to you to try and work out in what capacity he has been able to get himself involved (which you follow through with the characters of course). I felt that each of the three sections had a very different tone. I've never read any of Roberts' works before, but the way he made the three sections sound so different but at the same time still follow the previous sections, was an indication of the calibre of writer that Roberts is.

The story is set in the distant future, where space/asteroids have become densly populated in “shanty bubbles”, but there is still a big divide between the rich and poor, as well as there still being religious divides. The stories take place in a mix of off-world and on-world contexts, with Earth being a place that now only the mega-rich are able to visit or live on. Each section centres around a murder and the mystery to be solved is was how the murder was achieved. I think that Roberts has divised some very interesting ideas, and achieved what he set out to do in creating a sci-fi/detective book. The characters are well written, and fairly interesting, the characters of note being Jac, Diana, Iago and Eva. Jac is awesome. I dislike Diana, but I felt in some ways you were meant to. Iago was excellent, and Eva too I disliked but felt I was meant to.

However. I was not a massive fan of the book. I enjoyed the majority of it. Particularly the first part (be aware there are some pretty gruesome/graphic parts in this first section), the second and third sections were pretty good. They had some great ideas and interesting and surprising plot points, as well as at times trying to tackle some big questions in the science world (e.g. could we ever travel faster than the speed of light?) and in the reality of politics. I had two major bugbears for the book though:

1. Although an interesting idea, using dream sequences to play out parts of the mysteries in order to solve them, seemed a tad too easy a way of explaining it

2. The very ending was atrocious.

Point number 2 is what brought it down from a 4.5 to a 3.5 for me. I know a lot of people wouldn't feel the same as I do about the ending, so I would definitely encourage people to read it regardless! I would also still pick up some more of Roberts' work at a later date.