The House on the Cliff

In British journalist Williams’s uneven first novel and series opener, Welsh psychotherapist Jessica Mayhew finds herself strangely drawn to Gwydion Morgan, a handsome, anxiety-ridden actor who needs her help banishing a crippling fear of buttons (known as koumpounophobia). When Jessica discovers that Gwydion’s former au pair, Elsa Lindberg, died in a tragic drowning accident, her interest is piqued, and she begins researching Gwydion’s complicated home life. Meanwhile, Jessica’s teenage daughter is alternately sullen and rebellious, and her husband just confessed to sleeping with another woman. Jessica sees Gwydion as both a lover and a son, and later seriously contemplates having affairs with both him and his famous father, theater director Evan Morgan, to get back at her adulterous husband. The sympathetic Jessica makes up only in part for a clumsily wrought mystery, in which most of the plot twists are telegraphed too far in advance to have any real impact. Agent: Peter Straus, Rogers, Coleridge & White (U.K.). (Jan.)