GLASS HOUSES
Kirkus Reviews
March 2007
Section: Fiction; Mystery
Gregor Demarkian joins the defense of a man who may or not be
Philadelphia’s Plate Glass Killer.
When Henry Tyder emerges from an alley dripping with blood and
stinking of alcohol and worse, everyone assumes he strangled
the middle-aged woman back there, then slashed her face to bits,
marking her as his 11th victim. Henry confesses, but while two
warring detectives disparage each other and mangle the evidence so
badly that it’s inadmissible, Henry’s public defender has doubts
his client did it. For his part, Henry seems to use jail as a refuge
from the two half-sisters bent on drying him out and restoring him
to the social prominence expected of the family owning most of the
city’s real estate. Called in to untangle matters, Gregor Demarkian,
the Armenian-American Poirot (Hardscrabble Road, 2006, etc.), must
decide whether Henry is guilty, whether the fractious cops served
justice and why these serial killings, unlike others, include no
sexual component. Could someone else be the killer? Is more than one
killer loose? Gregor manages to put things right despite the emotional
upheaval he endures when Bennis Hannaford returns after a year away
without a word and asks him to marry her.
Haddam has great fun letting the Cavanaugh Street regulars skewer an
English reporter convinced that Pennsylvania is a red state. If her
plot unravels a bit at the end, the trip there is exhilarating.
Publication Date: 4/19/2007 0:00:00 Publisher: St. Martin’s Minotaur
Stage: Adult ISBN: 0-312-34307-8 Price: $24.95 Author: Haddam, Jane