I have no idea where I read the review that made me decide to download this novel from the library but I wonder if the reviewer was a paid relative of the author or the publisher.
The glass hotel is a fictional luxury establishment on a remote inlet in northern Vancouver Island, owned by a criminal New York financial guru modelled after Bernie Madoff. The action spans the globe with billionaires and their lifestyles described in rich detail, along with the down and out itinerant addicts who try to make a living writing music scores, producing music videos, and performing in seedy bars and hotel lounges.
There are more time shifts and minor characters than I could possibly keep track of. Whimsical musings of many characters include ‘shadow world’ what-ifs, and several seem to live in their own fantasy worlds and hallucinations. To be fair, the self-justifying denials of those involved in a sixty five billion dollar Ponzi scheme and their later lives in various prisons are entertaining and realistic- what we have come to expect from white collar criminals. But the description of the downfall of Alkaitis, the doppelgänger of Bernie Madoff, is no better than that of the real Bernie Madoff as carefully documented in Erin Arverdlund’s book, Too Good To Be True. (I have not seen the 2017 TV movie adaptation, The Wizard of Lies.)
To illustrate how unrealistic some of this story is, at the end, the cook on a container ship reminiscences about her life for eight pages after she falls off into the Atlantic and promptly drowns.
I cannot seriously recommend this book to anyone.
The Passionate Reader 