Book Review: 'The Dark House' (2012)

Given John Sedgwick's famous bloodlines — he's descended from the Massachusetts Sedgwicks, who begot both Andy Warhol's Edie and Kevin Bacon's Kyra — one might expect a debut novel more distinctive than the silly caper The Dark House, which reads like a dumbed-down Rear Window. Edward Rollins, a repressed trust-fund baby, works at an investment firm by day and follows complete strangers in his car at night, just to glean glimpses of their private lives. When a perky coworker joins him, they inadvertently stumble upon clues to a missing-persons case from Edward's murky past. From then on, Sedgwick seems unsure whether he's writing a thriller, a glib romance, or an episode of All My Children. C