The British Science Fiction Association Awards were announced last weekend and a crime novel — Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer by Adam Roberts — was the winner for Best Novel.
Described as "Golden Age science fiction meets Golden Age crime", it is a triptych of locked-room murder mysteries, not whodunits — Jack Glass is the murderer — but howdunits.
Read more about the book, below, which was published by Gollancz in hardcover this week in the US. (No ebook versions are yet available here.)
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Jack Glass: The Story of a Murderer
Adam Roberts
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 reader 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 science fiction, this is another bravura performance from Roberts. Whatever games he plays with the genre, whatever questions he asks of the reader, Roberts never loses sight of the need to entertain.
This novel has some wonderfully gruesome moments, is built around three gripping HowDunnits, and comes with liberal doses of sly humor. Roberts invites us to have fun and tricks us into thinking about both crime and science fiction via a beautifully structured novel set in a society whose depiction challenges notions of crime, punishment, power, and freedom.
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