House of glass

Pekkanen, who has coauthored a shiver of psychological suspense novels with Greer Hendricks (including The Golden Couple, 2022, and The Wife between Us, 2018), and who was the solo author of the 2023 shocker Gone Tonight, has concocted a terrifying gothic thriller. Her latest stars a century-old house that has a "Fall of the House of Usher" feel of danger and evil emanating from it--and a very tense family within. The narrator, Stella Hudson, is a lawyer who enters this strange house after a pregnant nanny has fallen to her death from one of the house's windows. Stella has been appointed as a best-interest attorney in a custody battle between the parents for the nanny's charge, a nine-year-old girl who witnessed the nanny's fall. Stella's access to the house and everyone connected to it puts her in the perfect position to determine whether the nanny fell, jumped, or was pushed out the window. Homicide suspects abound, since the father was having an affair with the nanny, the mother and nanny's boyfriend were both jealous and enraged, and even the little girl, mute since the incident, gives off some serious bad-seed vibes. The excellent portrayal of fragile psyches and knife-edge suspense throughout make this a winner.

Bestseller Pekkanen (Gone Tonight) delivers a tantalizing if somewhat uneven thriller featuring a young girl who stops speaking after witnessing her nanny's death. Washington, D.C., attorney Stella Hudson, who assesses the homes lives of children involved in custody battles, is assigned to nine-year-old Rose Barclay's case when the girl's wealthy parents file for divorce. Stella heads to the family's estate in Potomac, Md., to conduct the standard interviews, but soon after she arrives, she gets the nagging sense that everyone is hiding something. She finds it particularly disturbing that all of the home's glass objects have been removed or replaced with plastic replicas. When Stella's assignment broadens to include an investigation into the death of Rose's nanny--who fell from an attic window, either by accident or because she was pushed--memories of her own traumatic childhood surface. After a promising setup, Pekkanen takes her foot off the gas, abandoning the central mystery for too long in service of middling character development. Still, she conjures up a tense, quasi-gothic atmosphere, and Stella's sleuthing is often thrilling. This has its pleasures. Agent: Victoria Sanders, Victoria Sanders & Assoc. (Aug.)