In the sordid seamy side of Regency London, there exists a place called the Glass House.  Velvet-curtained glass walls opening into private rooms which cater to the more exotic tastes of the upper classes ranging from pedophiles to "unnaturals" and various other undesirables.  Name your perversion and you can have it -- at a price!  Not quite the kind of place you'd expect to find the wife of a rather dull barrister -- or our somewhat self-righteous hero, Captain Gabriel Lacey. ("Death before dishonor"  and all that!)  But we don't exactly find "Peaches", the barrister's wife, in the Glass House, instead we find her floating in the Thames with her head bashed in!  Enter the cashiered Captain who feels a kind of bond with the victim.  Peaches had another secret side to her life.  An ex-actress, she had connections with several unsavoury types, and was a regular at the Glass House.  The list of suspects is almost overwhelming -- but never to Captain Lacey whom you know will stop at nothing until he has hunted down her killer and the killer of her lover!

In Ashley Gardner's THE GLASS HOUSE, we are reintroduced to Captain Gabriel Lacey, the cashiered officer lamed by the treachery of his one-time friend and mentor, Colonel Brandon,  and his wife Louisa, who Lacey seems far too interested in!  

"Honorable" is the word most associated with the Captain -- but frankly, I found him to be a whining, pompous, ill-tempered rather unpleasant man in "The Hanover Square Affair" and had hoped that his bitterness was the result of the freshness of his injuries and betrayal.  Not so!  He didn't mellow with time and his "non-affair" with his old friend's wife reflects badly on both of them.  Neither is a paragon of virtue and one could almost sympathize with Brandon.  Almost!  But Lacey made me laugh out loud after Louisa tells him that she won't see him anymore, and later at a dinner he's angry at her for her timing and for spoiling his magnificent dinner! 

But here's the kicker -- while I dislike some of the characters (and who said I had to like them anyway?), nothing kept me from rapidly turning those pages!  Ms. Gardner certainly knows how to create some diverting though flawed characters, colorful dialogue and manages to throw in some quite fascinating contemporary commentary.  Like why it might be dangerous to walk too close to the windows in late night London!  One never knows what may come hurtling out of the upstairs windows! 

While there was a little too much waffling about who(could have)dunnit and why they(should have)dunnit, and everybody seems to be falling all over himself to confess, this was still a very readable book and I didn't really suspect the actual villain until near the end when Lacey once again compels him to confess!