The Great Houses of Pill Hill - by Diane Josefowicz Hardcover

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Great Houses of Pill Hill
"The Great Houses of Pill Hill is a witty, engrossing mystery with an immersive sense of place. Atmospheric and smart, this fresh take on the locked-room whodunit will keep you wonderfully off-balance until the very end."
--Danielle Trussoni, New York Times bestselling author of The Puzzle Box

"Perplexing, playful, and perfectly wild, The Great Houses of Pill Hill is a wonder of a novel, one that manages its mysteries with singular style. Cookie's way of seeing the world will upend your sense of what knowledge looks like, and of how often we know what we don't know and don't know what we do. Josefowicz has assembled an uncanny delight."
--Rivka Galchen, author of Everyone Knows Your Mother Is a Witch

"The Great Houses of Pill Hill crackles with historicity, jerry-rigged electricity, and unspent secrets between the walls. Keen, cutting, haunting, for fans of Donna Tartt's The Secret History, with a cast of unforgettable characters, Josefowicz spins socio-noir into gold at every twist and dark turn."
--Kirstin Allio, author of Double-Check for Sleeping Children and winner of the National Book Foundation's 5 Under 35 Award

"Hannah 'Cookie' Cooke might prefer to hide her smarts, but in Josefowicz's deft prose her acid-sharp observations practically leap from the page. The Great Houses of Pill Hill is a deliciously twisty whodunit, a tale of cold marriages, colder betrayals, and the murderous histories that can hide behind a well-painted façade."
--Helene Wecker, author of The Golem and the Jinni

"In this marvelously fun and sharp whodunnit, Josefowicz gives us a showstopper of a heroine in Cookie Cooke, with her talent for reshaping spaces of all kinds--and a sense of place so deep and multidimensional I felt like I was walking around New Preston alongside her. I loved every minute I spent inside this novel."
--Clare Beams, author of The Garden

"In Diane Josefowicz's electrifying novel The Great Houses of Pill Hill, interior designer Hannah 'Cookie' Cooke's efforts to restore a Gilded Age mansion trap her in a fatal circuit of deceit and desire. Josefowicz illuminates the darkest corners of the human soul with the searing clarity of a pyromaniac's torch and maps the architecture of emotion with the precision of a skilled draftsman. Part literary thriller, part psychological mystery, The Great Houses of Pill Hill is all one could ask for in a novel--elegance, passion, and intoxicating flame."
--Jacob M. Appel, author of Einstein's Beach House

"Josefowicz's tightly braided crime tale flirts with cozy mystery and builds to dynamite action as her spirited protagonist tackles the moribund with the same plucky determination as her interior design and crime scene miniatures. Move over, Jessica Fletcher, Cookie Cooke is on the case."
--LJ Pemberton, author of Still Alive

Praise for Diane Josefowicz

"Josefowicz finds the large truths in our smallest state, leaving an indelible mark on our broader literary landscape. A stunning debut."
--Jacob M. Appel, author of Einstein's Beach House

"Josefowicz brings humanity, warmth and disarming humor to lovable, struggling characters, exploring their affinities and conflicts."
--Hannah Pittard, author of Listen To Me

About the Author

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.