The Sound of Glass by Karen White

• Hardcover: 432 pages
• Publisher: NAL (May 12, 2015)

What They Say....The New York Times bestselling author of A Long Time Gone now explores a Southern family’s buried history, which will change the life of the woman who unearths it, secret by shattering secret. 

It has been two years since the death of Merritt Heyward’s husband, Cal, when she receives unexpected news—Cal’s family home in Beaufort, South Carolina, bequeathed by Cal’s reclusive grandmother, now belongs to Merritt.

Charting the course of an uncertain life—and feeling guilt from her husband’s tragic death—Merritt travels from her home in Maine to Beaufort, where the secrets of Cal’s unspoken-of past reside among the pluff mud and jasmine of the ancestral Heyward home on the Bluff. This unknown legacy, now Merritt’s, will change and define her as she navigates her new life—a new life complicated by the arrival of her too young stepmother and ten-year-old half-brother.

Soon, in this house of strangers, Merritt is forced into unraveling the Heyward family past as she faces her own fears and finds the healing she needs in the salt air of the Low Country.

What I Say....First of all, let me say that I have enjoyed a few of Karen White's books,  One thing that I like about her is that although she is a best selling writer, her books don't seem to follow a formula (I'm looking at you, Janet Evanovich).

On Folly Beach is a WW2 mystery that is told in flashbacks.  The House on Tradd Street is a ghost story.  And The Sound of Glass is about domestic violence and how many lives it touches through the generations.

The book starts out with a plane crash on an ordinary night.  I actually had to go back and reread the first chapter because it didn't seem to be making sense to me.  It started with such a bang that I was taken off guard.

While the mystery stayed as an undercurrent throughout the story, the reality of every day life took over.  Merritt is trying for a new beginning, and only wants to be left alone, but life just isn't working that way.  She is suddenly saddled with a stepmother she hates and a half-brother she doesn't know, along with her dead husband's estranged brother showing up all of the time.

Merritt is a domestic violence victim, although she has no idea how far back in her family this pattern actually goes, and Gibbes is also a child of domestic abuse, culminating in a covered up murder.  But neither of them really understand how these experiences have affected their every day lives and their ability to love.

As the story went on, I was having a hard time connecting the dots of the mystery, but by the end it tied itself up.  The crime scene nutshells were a little creepy, but this author does creepy well.

My verdict, another winner by Karen White.  Thank you NetGalley and Penguin Group and NAL for giving me a copy of this book for review.

Current Goodreads Rating 4.28