The Great Houses of Pill Hill - Hardcover

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by Diane Josefowicz (Author)

A scintillating, wickedly intricate locked-room mystery following an unconventional woman who makes miniatures of murder scenes and finds herself entangled in a real one when the client of her dream job turns up dead.

Hannah "Cookie" Cooke, an interior decorator with a sideline making miniature reproductions of crime scenes for the local police department, lands her dream job when New Preston's wealthiest couple hires her to renovate their historic New England home. But things go spectacularly wrong when her client Chuck--with whom she is having an affair--is murdered at the housewarming party.

The detective on the case commissions one of Cookie's miniatures to help solve the baffling murder. While grappling with her own complicated role in Chuck's life--and the thorny layers of her own envies, resentments, and ambitions--Cookie delves into the strange details of his death, including his overly involved therapist, his wife's nebulous textile empire, and a room decorated in nineteenth-century Egyptian kitsch hidden on the premises. In untangling the mystery, Cookie reveals an ugly truth about New Preston's elite that might prove deadly.

At once an irreverent interpretation of the hard-boiled genre and a skewering of traditional domesticity, this show-stopping work of crime fiction is crackling with narrative voice, resulting in a read that is equally engrossing and electrifying.

Author Biography

Diane Josefowicz is the author of Guardians & Saints: Stories, L'Air du Temps (1985), and Ready, Set, Oh: A Novel. She is also the author, with Jed Z. Buchwald, of two histories of Egyptology: The Zodiac of Paris and The Riddle of the Rosetta. She serves as managing editor of the Victorian Web, the internet's oldest and largest website devoted to Victoriana. A graduate of Brown University, she holds a PhD in History of Science from MIT and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island. Find her online at www.dianejosefowicz.com.

Number of Pages: 368

Dimensions: 1.35 x 8.36 x 5.52 IN

Publication Date: May 05, 2026