Book Review: House of Glass | Sarah Pekkanen

I absolutely loved Sarah Pekkanen and Greer Hendricks’ collaborative thrillers (highly recommend An Anonymous Girl, The Golden Couple, and a book I consider to be an O.G. genre-defining psychological thriller, The Wife Between Us). I was bummed when I learned they weren’t going to be co-writing anymore (also in the parasocial way that we all think our favorite authors are our friends, I worried they had a falling out!). But thankfully, Sarah Pekkanen has gone back to her solo-publishing career and released some bangers. Did you read Gone Tonight? If not you really should! 

Let’s get into House of Glass because this was another twisted, tantalizing thriller that I can’t wait to chat about!

What is House of Glass about?

On the outside they were the golden family with the perfect life. On the inside they built the perfect lie.

A young nanny who plunged to her death, or was she pushed? A nine-year-old girl who collects sharp objects and refuses to speak. A lawyer whose job it is to uncover who in the family is a victim and who is a murderer. But how can you find out the truth when everyone here is lying?

Rose Barclay is a nine-year-old girl who witnessed the possible murder of her nanny – in the midst of her parent’s bitter divorce – and immediately stopped speaking. Stella Hudson is a best interest attorney, appointed to serve as counsel for children in custody cases. She never accepts clients under thirteen due to her own traumatic childhood, but Stella’s mentor, a revered judge, believes Stella is the only one who can help.

From the moment Stella passes through the iron security gate and steps into the gilded, historic DC home of the Barclays, she realizes the case is even more twisted, and the Barclay family far more troubled, than she feared. And there’s something eerie about the house itself: It’s a plastic house, with not a single bit of glass to be found.

As Stella comes closer to uncovering the secrets the Barclays are desperate to hide, danger wraps around her like a shroud, and her past and present are set on a collision course in ways she never expected. Everyone is a suspect in the nanny’s murder. The mother, the father, the grandmother, the nanny’s boyfriend. Even Rose. Is the person Stella’s supposed to protect the one she may need protection from?

What did I think?

I’ve seen some criticism of this book saying that the twists weren’t mind-blowing enough, or some who felt they were predictable. Perhaps this book isn’t for those who are looking for a jaw-dropper blindside. But for those who like a tense, character-driven psychological thriller with some delicious twists and turns, this book is for you!

Narrator and main character Stella is a positively fascinating character. She is an attorney who works as a Best Interest Attorney. If you don’t know what that is, don’t fret! I didn’t either, but I found it compelling and also I’m grateful that positions like this exist in the world. Essentially, Stella is there as an advocate specifically for the child impacted by this divorce and the things going on in the household. She works independently to assess the home situation and makes a recommendation to the court as to what would be best for the child.

In this case, the child at the center of the case is a prodigy named Rose, who witnessed her nanny’s death and hasn’t spoken since. This comes in the middle of a contentious divorce between her parents, who are rich as sin and live in an opulent glass house. The beautiful nanny, Tina, plummeted to her death from one of those glass windows. Of course before that, she had a torrid affair going on with Ian Barclay. Since Tina is dead, the details of the affair predominantly come from Ian. Never trust a man who claims the affair was a one time thing, amicable when it ended, or that the mistress is “crazy”. All of those can be true, but none of those can be true as well!

In this case, the affair is impossible to deny because Tina was pregnant at the time of her death. Oh, Ian… You really got yourself into it this time. You’d think that the mother, Beth, would be sympathetic. She isn’t, though. The money is actually mostly Beth’s money. Beth herself is fragile and slightly unhinged. She’s deathly afraid of glass ever since the nanny’s death, which Stella and I both found suspicious. Apparently fear of glass is a real thing, though. The poor cook for the house can’t even use a glass measuring cup. Unfortunately for Beth’s new phobia, she lives in a literal house of glass. Ian, being the stand up cheater that he is, is going through the process of replacing the countless windows in the house with plexiglass. This is weird, if you ask me. It’s actually not a house of glass, then. It’s a house of plastic. Somehow this feels claustrophobic even imagining it.

The story has a finite number of suspects, which actually made the mystery more interesting. The timeline between the nanny’s fall and when she was discovered seems to eliminate some of the suspects, but introduce others. Namely, Rose is a strange child and there is something creepy about her. I found myself pondering if it is possible that Rose did it. Others seem to think so, and are working hard to protect her from that suspicion becoming more substantial. Meanwhile Stella has quite a backstory of her own that was an absolute roller coaster.

A tense book that I found full of surprises!

Thank you to St. Martin’s Press and Macmillan Audio for my advance copies. Opinions are my own.