House of Glass (St. Martin’s Press 2024) by Sarah Pekkanen is a wonderfully crafted, well-paced mystery with a good bit of psychological thriller blended in. It is a character driven “who done it?” but not in a police procedural way as no law enforcement detectives are center stage in solving the death of a young nanny. Rather the role of sleuth goes to a female lawyer, Stella Hudson, who endured a hard childhood of her own.
House of Glass is a splendid read, smoothly fitting together various mysteries into a satisfying whole. And while a complicated story, the various threads work to enhance each other’s impact and to create a definite tension and suspense. Too often things are not at all what they seem, and the unexplainable and the unexplained vie for readers’ attention. What really is happening in the here and now is often as important a question as what really did happen in the past.
In the story, an attractive rich couple live in a kind of hundred-year-old gothic mansion in the Washington D.C. area. The wife is the one with money—lots of it. They are biological parents to nine-year-old Rose Barclay, a gifted prodigy, wise and educated beyond her age and talented at the piano. She might also be a “bad seed” child killer. And she suffers from traumatic mutism, which is a rare and poorly understood condition.
In traumatic mutism, the onset is swift and overwhelming and occurs after severe trauma. In Rose’s case, that trauma was seeing her nanny plunge to her death. Stella is pulled into the case to represent Rose because as a child, Stella too suffered with traumatic mutism after spending a night in a closet only to crawl out in the morning and find her mother’s dead body.
When Rose’s beautiful, young nanny crashes through an upstairs window to her death on the patio below, it is unclear if she fell accidentally or was pushed. And if pushed, by which of the residents—the child, the father, the mother, or the resident grandmother? The police seem to have more or less given up, but when the parents decide to divorce and both seek full custody of the child, the main character—Stella Hudson—enters Rose’s life. Stella is a “best interest attorney, or guardian ad litem.” She represents the interests of children or teens in contested court proceedings such as custody suits. She is also the child of a dysfunctional upbringing with emotional scars—and a deep mystery—of her own.
Though Stella is not per se a detective, she soon engages in her own attempts to solve who killed the nanny. Each of the potential suspects seems to have a valid alibi, even young Rose. But things do not add up, not even remotely so, and strange things happen in the house that defy logic. Not that this is a haunted house story, but there is definitely a gloss of the gothic when Stella hears strange voices. Stella also discovers that the nanny too, before her death, heard strange voices.
The title comes from the fact the protagonist soon realizes that “Nothing in this house is made of glass.” Even the photographs hanging on the walls have had the glass covers removed and the drinking glasses are all plastic. The husband tries to explain this away by claiming that his wife suffers from nelophobia—the fear of glass. But after Stella sees Rose pocketing a piece of broken glass as if for a weapon, she wonders if the lack of glass is far more sinister than the parents are willing to reveal.
Carefully woven into Rose’s story is Stella’s own story. With exceptional talent and skill, the author leaks in hints and glimpses of Stella’s childhood and teen years, and how she managed to graduate law school despite all the bad things she endured.
Stella’s patron saint, Charles, is now a judge. He is a father figure she trusts, and he has helped her though many difficulties after what seemed to be a random meeting between them when she was a teenager. Their story is far more complicated than that, of course, and becomes part of a secondary mystery. The question of how Stella’s mother died—suicide or murder or accident—creates yet another suspenseful thread in the novel. Stella observes that her “childhood has been stalking [her her] entire adult life. Maybe I need to turn around and finally face it.” But what she discovers might be too difficult for her to face.
Sarah Pekkanen
This is a good book, a very good book. The author displays great talent in her writing and in her plotting.
A New York Times and USA Today bestselling author, Sarah Pekkanen, lives near Washington D.C. with her family. Besides writing numerous bestsellers, she is also an active volunteer for rescued animals.
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