Breaking the Dark by Lisa Jewell (Marvel Crime #1)

Format: Audiobook (Spotify)

Read: July 2024

Sound the claxons because 🚨 LISA JEWELL WROTE A JESSICA JONES NOVEL! 🚨

I have never clicked on an audiobook so fast! I nearly fell over myself when I saw this on Spotify!

I love Jessica Jones! She’s such a cool and interesting Marvel character with depth of character that makes her a great fit for a novel and an author like Lisa Jewell. She’s sort of like Veronica Mars but with even more harrowing trauma, a lot more swearing, casual sex and hard drinking… And superpowers.

I own the Alias omnibus edition, but hadn’t ever gotten around to reading it until this audiobook got me to finally unwrap that and get right back to the roots of Jessica as a character. Of course, I also loved the Netflix TV series (except season 3 which made me angrier than any other TV series I can think of, have I ever hated a character more that season 3 Trish? I don’t think I have!).

This Marvel Crime novel is set in the comic book universe rather than the cinematic universe, so while the Jessica Jones TV show will give you the background you need on the character some of the fine details are a bit different. Breaking the Dark is a new case for Jessica, and while it picks a few bits from Alias which is fun if you read that, you definitely don’t need to! I would say it picks up Jessica’s story from just before the finale of Alias, and retells the final bit of that (because she sure doesn’t go off to England!).. but that’s fine. Adapting comic books often means the same story often gets told several different ways! I would think of Breaking the Dawn on the adaption continuum as somewhere between Jessica Jones and Alias.

If you do not know this awesome character, Jessica Jones is a Private Investigator in New York. She has superpowers (strength, speed and kind of being able to jump-fly but not being able to land) but she doesn’t do the costume wearing heroics any more. She has some serious trauma which has coped with through hard drinking and sex. At this point she is hooking up with Luke Cage, but it’s just a casual thing. Her hard exterior and penchant for swearing hide a scared, lonely young woman who still struggles with destructive feelings of shame from her past with The Purple Man (aka Killgrave).

In this story she takes a case for a wealthy woman who is concerned about her teenage twins strange behaviour and eerily perfect skin. They came back from visiting their father in England as different kids, and she pays for Jessica to the small rural village to investigate what happened.

I don’t know if Lisa Jewell was selected because of the England setting or if that came about because of her, but it does mean this feels fairly authentic if idealised for an American audience! The difficulty is that the audiobook narrator (Helen Laser) is very American and all the English accents are that same generic one that American’s think we all have, but nobody really sounds like (especially people in Essex). It’s a little painful, but I’ve definitely heard worse.¹

The main mystery story was an interesting one and I thought the themes of self-esteem, of feeling less than perfect (or what that even is), work well at this point in Jessica Jones’s personal story. I also like that it features people with extraordinary abilities just actually wanting to live a normal human live, as Jessica does. As I have come to expect with Lisa Jewell the characters are everyday relatable, and the mystery unravels at a good pace, with satisfying twists and turns.

Overall, as both a Lisa Jewell fan and a Jessica Jones fan, I am the exact audience for this book and I loved it! If you are simply a Lisa Jewell fan and don’t know anything about Marvel then maybe avoid this one. Or if you are interested read a little bit about Jessica first (or watch the TV show) otherwise you may struggle.

I am super grateful to this book for getting me to finally read Alias (5 stars for that, it’s fucking great!), and that’s also reignited an interest in reading comic books again!

1. side note: after this and When Women Were Dragons on audio, I’ve come to understand that American’s pronounce the word shone like “shown” … which is weird (it’s “shon”). ↩︎