House of Glass by Sarah Pekkanen

 Unevenly paced psychological thriller left me disappointed.

I started this book with high anticipation. The premise was intriguing — a female attorney, Stella Hudson, is assigned as guardian ad litem for a nine year old girl in the center of a custody battle because her parents are going through a contentious divorce. The situation is complicated by a few things that immediately start setting off some alarms for me: the girl has traumatic mutism (same as our MC did as a child) and recently her nanny died from a fall out of a window of the family home. Right away I start thinking that somebody murdered the nanny and am on the hunt for the culprit. 

All of a sudden there are like twenty different things going on that start to irritate me. I don’t care about the MC’s past or her mother. I want to know the deal with Rose, the child, and if she’s being sheltered or if she’s like the bad seed. So many uninteresting side plots that involve Stella that I honestly didn’t care about. When things start to become way to coincidental and unbelievable is when I start to turn off. All I wanted was to read about Rose’s situation and the role of a best interest attorney in a custody case. Now Stella’s trying to solve the murder, meanwhile she’s fixating on her mother’s death, and also starting to doubt her relationship with Charles. And then her flirtation? It was all just too much.

My main problem with this story was that it meandered all over the place and Stella’s behavior and responses just seemed too much over the top. All these tangents that had nothing to do with anything and just drew out a simple straightforward plot. I didn’t like any of the characters. And I really don’t enjoy reading about kids and nasty parents. So many cliches in the book. The last couple of chapters were completely ridiculous. Glad I never have to hear about any of them again. 

I listened to the audiobook while also following along in the e-book ARC. The narrator was OK but some of her voices for characters didn’t work for me. I think I should have just put the audio aside and read the book and could have been done that much faster. Definitely not a favorite.

This is a standalone and is not part of any series.

Tags: divorce, custody, murder, adultery, parents, mutism, drugs