books by Sarah Pekkanen | Seattle Book Mama

3.5 stars, rounded upwards.

Author Sarah Pekkanen is known for writing psychological thrillers, and her newest novel, House of Glass, is a real page turner. My thanks go to NetGalley and St. Martin’s Press for the invitation to read and review. This book will be available to the public August 6, 2024.

Our protagonist is Stella Hudson, and she works as guardian ad litem, which is a professional whose job it is to represent the best interests of a child when he or she is the subject, or an important participant in, a court case. Stella’s father figure and mentor is a judge, and a case has come up that he feels Stella is uniquely qualified for. It’s a divorce case, two wealthy individuals squabbling over a child. The child, Rose Barclay, has experienced a great trauma that has left her mute. She saw her nanny fall (be pushed?) out of the attic window and die, and she hasn’t spoken since. By convenient coincidence, Stella also experienced the same condition after a childhood trauma of her own; this is why Charles, her mentor, has asked her to serve.

I’ll tell you right now, I am not terribly impressed with this book. A protagonist who’s been traumatized in ways related to her task at hand is fast becoming a trope, and I’m ready to be done with it. Rose is a prodigy, brilliant in every way, which is also overused, and very convenient for an author that doesn’t want to deal with developmental stages even though the child is a major character. Also, Stella’s job does not require her to solve the nanny’s murder, that’s the job of the cops. Yet the book leads us to believe that this is part of a guardian ad litem’s work.

But the most annoying facet of this mystery is that I had it solved before the 20% mark. That’s just straight up ridiculous. If I had solved it because I am so darned clever, that would be one thing, but I feel as if my cat could probably have done the same. First, a suspect that’s identified very early in the story is almost never the killer, and then of course, the person least suspected by the other characters is often the one that did it. And so at first I waited hopefully for some new spin or plot twist that would make me change my mind, but it never damn happened.

Consequently, I was prepared to give this book a rating of 3 stars, which is lower than my average, but one thing stopped me. I noticed that, however cranky I felt about this transparently obvious mystery, I didn’t want to stop reading it. I could have quit at the halfway mark, skimmed the ending to be certain I was right, and then written my review, yet even though I knew exactly how it would shake out, I still wanted to see/hear the rest of the story.

I was fortunate in having both the digital review copy and the audiobook, and the narrator, Laura Benanti, does a first rate job. That’s worth something, too.

Because of the fact that Pekkanen’s mysteries are beginning to feel formulaic, I am probably finished with this author, but I also think there are a great many readers that will like it. Nevertheless, my recommendation to you is to get it free or cheap, rather than to pay full cover price.

I’ve been reading and enjoying Sarah Pekkanen’s novels for years now, but Gone Tonight is far and away the best of the bunch. My thanks go to Net Galley, Macmillan Audio and St. Martin’s Press for the invitation to read and review. This book will be available to the public August 1, 2023. If you love psychological fiction or thrillers, you should order it now.

In her previous thrillers—the ones I’ve read, at least—there is similarity. She’s written about women ganging up on one woman, and love triangles, or what appear to be love triangles. This one is different, and it’s better. Here we have just two characters, mother Ruth and her young adult daughter Catherine. The unseen character is James, Catherine’s biological father. Throughout the story, Ruth is vigilant, always watchful. She’s afraid she’s being stalked, or investigated, or otherwise watched. Ruth isn’t merely careful; she keeps a bug-out bag ready for each of them, varies her routine to where she really doesn’t have one. She doesn’t take the same exact route to any of the places she frequents regularly. To see and hear this character, one would think that the CIA, the Mafia, and all of the cartels were out to get her and kill her.

Early in the book, Ruth provides Catherine with some hard news: she has early onset Alzheimer’s. I tell you this in particular, because when I saw it, my eyes glazed over with boredom and I thought that this thriller wasn’t going to thrill me at all. I nearly slid the book onto the bottom of my stack, and that would have been a terrible mistake, because this is *not* an Alzheimer’s story.

Catherine has never met any of her relatives; Ruth lies to keep her from investigating them. But now Catherine is an intelligent adult, and there is the internet. It’s mighty hard to keep a secret these days, and that’s rough for Ruth, because she’s got a lot of them, some bigger than others. As Catherine digs, she is surprised, and this makes her dig even harder. She keeps finding things, and Ruth keeps changing her explanations. It isn’t long before Catherine realizes she’s been lied to, and she stops telling Ruth what she discovers.

The format Pekkanen uses is an effective one, and it’s easy to follow. She changes the point of view in the standard way from one to the other and back with both sides told in the first person, but the tricky part is how to provide Ruth’s narrative. Catherine can give us her first person narrative and we think nothing of it, but Ruth talks to no one except her daughter, and even so, she lies to her daughter all the damn time, so under what circumstances will she spill her guts to us? The solution isn’t all that original, but it’s effective and reasonably believable. Ruth has a secret diary that she’s writing for Catherine to have when Ruth is gone. It requires me to overlook the unlikelihood of someone as obsessively private as Ruth sitting down and documenting the whole shooting match, including names and dates in writing, but this is such a fun book that I set my momentary disbelief aside and keep reading, because I have to know what happens next.

Once we are past the Alzheimer’s passage, my attention is rapt, but friend, the last ten percent of Gone Tonight is one for the ages! I rarely say this, but this creepy little novel would make an amazing movie or miniseries.

Actor Kate Mara reads the audio version, and she does a fine job. Highly recommended!