SOLVED. Adult mystery with light horror elements, set mainly in glass making workshop in Florida with backstory scenes in Germany. Spoilers. [s]

[Geri]

I read this novel sometime between 1996-2001. The genre is hard to classify since it has elements of several, and I don't recall a genre sticker on the spine (library book). It reads almost like gothic in some sections. The main character is a young man named Kurt, originally from Germany, who comes to Florida to apprentice (I think) in a relative's glass workshop. He is joined by two cousins. His uncle, a roofer who works on cathedrals has come (also from Germany) to do some kind of work at the workshop after making an alcoholic mess of his life in Germany and losing his oldest son in a tragic roofing accident. The younger son and a cousin called Uta befriend Kurt. Soon Kurt begins to suspect that the family business involved more macabre work than simple stained glass and that his uncle, who has miraculously recovered from his former state, has been slated to take over the shop and seems to have some kind of dark supernatural help. I've forgotten many plot details but in the course of the story a shop assistant, a vet with a bullet in his arm, goes missing and there's a family ritual called Second Communion where Kurt bites into a piece of meat with a bullet in it. I can't remember exactly what the family business was covering up or creating, or why the assistant had to be killed. (SPOILER) The book ends with Kurt somehow luring the whole family into a barn and exploding or burning it because he recognizes the evil in the family. On the final page, his letter to his mother back home gives hints that he himself is becoming the person his uncle had become.

[Ayshe]

The Martyring seems likely?

[Geri]

Yes, it looks like that's it. Thank you!!