The authorities, returning, would find the prison empty. He couldn’t rid the place of all traces, of course; there was a lot of blood, on the walls and in the tunnel, and it would be a simple matter for the Police to DNA it and determine from whom it had come. But it was as much misdirection as Jac could manage.

I was at a conference the day that the BSFA nominations were announced, and as speakers around the table opined on the future of the European Union, I was utilising the hotel wifi to download copies of the books to my iPad and iPhone, which in itself was a delightfully futuristic experience. I’m working through the shortlist, as I like to do, in reverse order of popularity on LibraryThing, so will follow with Dark Eden, Empty Space, Intrusion and finally 2312 (which is owned by twice as many LibraryThing users, and almost four times as many GoodReads users, as the other four combined).

Jack Glass is not in fact about the famous bigot, but about a master criminal in the far future, in a solar system dominated by a few rich families. The novel is divided into three parts: in the first, our legless hero escapes from an apparently escape-proof cell; in the second, he helps spoiled rich girl Diana Argent solve a murder on her own estate; and in the third, he and Diana together work out how they were rescued from capture by her enemies. There’s a lot of clever stuff; there’s a lot of entertaining writing; there’s a lot of interesting speculation about how a future society will divide between the ultra-rich and the poor, in what is recognisably a world related to last year’s By Light Alone. I felt that the solution to the third of the three mysteries was a bit too clever, and I also would have liked a bit more of a sense of place from the passages set in the Eastern Mediterranean, but basically I enjoyed it and my BSFA reading is off to a good start – as usual.

Bechdel pass: Diana and her sister discuss faster than light travel.