Opening with the arresting image of a corpse floating in a Perspex “sky pool” suspended high above Manhattan’s streets – “the long blonde hair rippling like seaweed and the cloudburst of red turning the water a rusty-reddish brown” – In Glass Houses leans into the classic crime fiction trope of pitting the haves against the have-nots.
Here the haves are New York’s gilded elite, the beneficiaries of generational wealth, the most ostentatious symbol of which is the Sky Building, an all-glass edifice that trumpets style, elegance and a contemptuous disregard for the opinions of the 99 per cent who gaze on in wonder with their noses pressed up against the glass.
Not all of the have-nots are cowed and awed, however. The corpse in the sky pool dredges up painful memories for Eddie Wright, a workaholic reporter with the New York Post whose attempts, 20 years previously, to expose the murderer of socialite Juliet Fox were stymied by a legal system bought and paid for by Manhattan’s finest. Haunted by her failure, and determined to get to the facts of the latest scandal to rock the ancien regime, Eddie vows that this time the truth will out.
New York is fertile ground for Edel Coffey, whose debut novel Breaking Point (which won Best Crime Novel at the Irish Book Awards in 2022) and its follow-up, In Her Place (2024), are also set in the Big Apple. Here the setting is ideal for the purpose of exploring conspicuous wealth and the amorality of those corrupted absolutely by power, although the distinction between rich and poor is a little too starkly presented.
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The property developer Bryant Fox, the politically connected lawyer Bentwell and the socialite Samsara Black are grasping, predatory and vapidly cruel, while the little people – the single mother Marley, the building doorman Vivian and the working-class stiff Dave – are invariably caring, well-meaning victims of a rigidly stratified class system.
Eddie, however, is a complex character, classically conceived as a dogged seeker as she pursues the facts and redemption (and perhaps even love), and fans of her previous novels will undoubtedly recognise in Eddie what has become Coffey’s forte, the Everywoman who has “learned the hard way that truth sometimes wasn’t enough”.
