House of Glass

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.)