Fish Are Friends, Not Food: A Review of The Glass Eel by J.J. Viertel

Hello, Book Nerds! Welcome back to Reading Has Ruined My Life or welcome if you are new. As always, my name is Hannah and I am your captain on this journey into my bookcases.

I have a very special review for you today, Book Nerds. Today’s review is brought to you by The Mysterious Press and Wunderkind PR who sent me an advanced copy of today’s book. They aren’t paying me for my review, they just sent me the book for free. All thoughts, feelings, and opinions on this title are mine alone. Thank you very much to The Mysterious Press and Wunderkind PR for sending me a copy of today’s read. Seriously, thank you, it means a lot to me when someone out there wants to send me books. Thank you, thank you!

And what title was I so kindly sent? Well, please give a warm welcome to The Glass Eel by J.J. Viertel! The Glass Eel releases on September 9, 2025.

As always, a spoiler alert is in order. If you’ve read any other review on this site then you will know I love to spoil the entirety of the books I read. This is your one and only warning. I also have a content and trigger warning to give. There are a lot of topics in this book that may be triggering to some. The Glass Eel has mentions of child death, death caused by drunk driving, drug and alcohol addiction, and animal cruelty. There is a lot going on in this thriller so I do suggest looking up other content warnings if there is something you are worried about as I may have missed some topics. Now let’s crack in.

You would never believe that a small town in Maine was home to a major poaching ring. But that is the case when it comes to Caterpillar Island. Home to down on their luck fishers, many in the community find themselves fishing in creeks during the dead of the night for baby elvers–two-inch long baby eels worth a couple grand on the black market.

Enter Jeanette King. She is woken up at the start of The Glass Eel by loud noises and bright lights coming from the bay outside her house. Turns out, it’s her ex-husband causing the disturbance. Upon heading outside, Jeanette spies the boat her ex-husband bought and named after her. When she boards said boat to ask him why he’s waking her up before dawn, no one is there. All she finds a tank full of elvers. Odd, very, very odd. And odder still, she receives a tackle box full of money which leads to many deaths over the course of the story.

What follows is Jeanette getting drawn into the seedy underbelly of Caterpillar Island in the search for answers. Answers of where he ex-husband went, who is the ringleader of this poaching crime ring, and how can she stop the criminals. She teams up with a local cop and an environmental activist to find these answers. But the deeper they dig, the more questions they have, and the more danger they find themselves in.

I found The Glass Eel to be very good at times, but at other times I did find myself dissociating. Let's start with the positives. There is so much beautiful, and often times gritty, imagery. The imagery is 100% the best part of this book and what kept me reading. The descriptions, especially the nature descriptions, are beautiful and vivid. Did I really need to read a chapter from the point of view of an eel or lobster from the time they were born to when they either were captured and killed or captured and ate a body? No, these little bonus chapters realistically don’t need to be added, but the prose is just so beautiful that their inclusion feels absolutely necessary.

10-out-of-10 imagery

J.J. Viertel truly did an impressive job with the nature imagery. The black market elvers poaching ring was also incredibly interesting to me, I found the authors (father-son writing team Jack and Josh Viertel) to include a lot of depth to the characters involved with the crime ring. Each character had various levels of knowledge on what they were doing, each had their own reasoning as to why they were involved, and each character had a full background even when it wasn’t needed. I applaud the authors for their level of detail when it came to this aspect of the story. It would have been so easy to simply villainize the poachers, and don’t get me wrong they all suck for what they’re doing, but by adding the level of details they did, Jack and Josh Viertel helped to humanize some of those involved in the crime ring; which I feel is something that can easily be forgotten about or completely left out in some thrillers. While the poaching situation is very black and white, the characters involved are much more morally gray.

Speaking of characters, The Glass Eel does suffer from something close to Too Many Characters Syndrome. While most of the main characters are easy to remember and differentiate, the minor characters can blend together. I’m specifically talking about some of the villains, some of the higher ups in the poaching ring to be exact. One would think these characters would be easy to remember and differentiate as they’re the villains after all, the main villains for that matter, but I could not tell you the difference between some of these men. I do believe it's because these men are virtually the same. They’re all wealthy, semi-powerful men being driven forward by corporate greed. While that’s definitely the villain one would expect in a story like this, they are all the same man. Because I didn’t know which villain was which at times, I had a hard time following along, grew bored, and would often dissociate in the middle of a chapter. Not even beautiful nature imagery could save me from mindlessly flipping pages.

I'm not saying this is actual footage of me during some late night reading sessions, but it is something close.

If I’m being honest, I didn’t know if I was going to like The Glass Eel when I first picked up the book. It's really not a book I would pick up on my own. But I was pleasantly surprised with what I found! I did not anticipate an environmental political thriller combined with the historic and present day treatment of indigenous people, drug and alcohol addiction, and class issues to mix as well as they did. Truthfully, I thought some of the topics would be pushed to the back-burner and forgotten about or left as a half-baked idea to make the book look deep on paper but meaningless when it came to execution. Everything was actually discussed and woven into the story without being forced in.

The Glass Eel was a good novel. While I love a good thriller and mystery read, The Glass Eel is not a book I would pick up for myself. I don’t tend to read political thrillers, they aren’t my preferred type of mystery novel. But this one was pretty good. Yes, the read had its faults, but overall the story was engrossing. Had I been able to differentiate between some of the villains more than I did, I dare say this read would have been fantastic. I do have to dock some points from it as I did dissociate in the middle of chapters quite a few times. This read is far from perfect, but it surprised me with the quality of writing and the story at large.

With that, I shall bid you all adieu. Another huge thank you goes out to The Mysterious Press and Wunderkind PR for sending me a copy of The Glass Eel by J.J. Viertel. It truly means a lot to me when someone out there wants to send me books. Thank you, thank you.

And thank you for joining me today, Book Nerds. I hope you had a lovely time here today and I will see you all again next week with another great post. If you can’t wait till then, then I highly suggest giving RHRML a follow over on Instagram (@ReadingHasRuinedMyLife). I post there almost daily so come back often to revel in literary goodness. You can also follow the blog on Twitter and BlueSky (@RHRMLBlog). If you want something not related to books then you can check out my podcast Nothing to See Hear. It stars me and two of my dearest friends and we talk pretty much everything. We’ve got episodes on bad 90’s wrestling, Barbie, Scooby-Doo, haunted houses, and Disney, just to name a few things. You can find the show on Spotify and YouTube.

Until next time, stay safe, wash your hands, and read some good books for me.

See y'all then, bye!