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.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Great Houses of Pill Hill by Diane Josefowicz, which releases on May 5th 2026.
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.
EXCERPT
We were four hours past Reno and running short on cash. We stopped so Harry could make a call, and he returned with good news—there was an opening for a pit mechanic at the Bonneville track. But I’d be on my own for a few days. Was that a problem, he wondered.
No problem, I said. I was happy to hold the fort while he earned enough to fund the next leg of our trip, wherever it took us.
Having failed to specialize in art school, I’d hardly covered myself with glory, and now that I’d graduated, I was in a jobless funk, jealous of the students I’d previously scorned, who majored in practical things like graphic design. Even worse were the ones who graduated into immediate acclaim, with solo shows in Boston and Philadelphia if not New York.
My closest friend, a spitfire named Erica Subiaco, had majored in sculpture, which was not practical either, and she had already left New Preston to chase work as a scenery painter in Hollywood. She sent breezy letters, keeping me up to date. In one, she included a photograph of herself sprawled in front of a batik wall hanging, looking relaxed and confident, a Left Coast creative in the perpetual sunshine, making rent while chasing down gallerists in the off hours. Harry’s road trip felt like an escape from being left behind.
Harry found a motel with a vacancy, an efficiency room with a kitchenette. There was a gas station nearby, attached to a diner. The dust-and-brush landscape slipped toward the dark line of the horizon; over it all, a blue cup of sky.
I shut the door on Harry’s receding back and stretched out on the pilled coverlet, powder-blue wool-poly washed thin. I hugged myself. A huge chunk of time stretched in front of me, completely free and mine, all mine.
There was a ritual in art school: At the beginning of every term, the teachers would have us all perform the same exercise. Starting from the nearest corner and working clockwise, we were to name every single thing in the room, right down to the wall scuffs and the busy forelegs of the wolf spider nesting in the window lock. The point was not just to look, but to figure out exactly what you were looking at—in other words, to see.
I found the exercise meditative, calming. It cleared the mind. Alone in the motel room, I was no longer a student. But surely the magic of the exercise did not depend on that.
The dim room was a collage of blues: the pale-blue door with its deadbolt; the low-pile carpet, beige with thin stripes of blueprint-blue; the long mirror, foxed in the corners, in which I observed my own reflection, my tanned legs sticking out from my cutoff shorts as I lounged atop the powder-blue coverlet. Over the bed, a brightly painted pair of Nevada mountain bluebirds popped from an expanse of deep-blue velvet set in a rough-hewn wooden frame. The kitchenette was on the far side. Beyond that, a door opened onto the bathroom, though all was blue darkness from where I lay. On the nightstand was a fake Tiffany table lamp and a bowl of cobalt glass containing two deep-red apples, and beside that a pile of advertisements for local attractions. The racetrack schedule rested on top.
Hunger stole over me: class dismissed. Disappointingly, the apples were plastic.
I gathered my wallet and room key. The diner was thirty yards away, and my stomach was rumbling. Outside, the hot air seemed to split as I pressed through it. As I entered the diner, a bell rang, summoning an older woman in an apron. Her name tag said Doocie.
I took a seat at the counter. Doocie gave me a laminated menu and disappeared through swinging kitchen doors. A moment later, while I was studying the menu, Doocie returned with a phone clapped to her ear and staked a position by the coffee pots, the curling cord stretched taut.
I told them everything I saw and heard, she said loudly. Is that not what you wanted me to do?
There was a silence as she listened. Then, cursing, she hurled the phone away. It flew over the swinging doors and landed with a clatter somewhere beyond. A man roared: DOOCIE!
She pulled an order pad from her apron: What can I get you?
I ordered a soda and buttered toast. She fitted the slip to the slide, tapped the little bell. Order up!
Slip and slide: A summer day in New Preston, my mother stemming chrysanthemums and setting them to float in a crystal bowl. Order up, she said, pushing a flower toward me.
Doocie slapped a tumbler of soda and ice on the counter. The desert sun, the long drive, my gnawing hunger—everything had made me feral. Bold.
Doocie, I said. You told them what you saw. But what did you see? What did you hear?
I guess you’re new in town, she said. Buckle up. Some months back, there was a death.
Long story short: A man had been shot in one of the motel rooms. All signs pointed to suicide: The rifle had been rigged so he could pull the trigger from the bed. But Doocie had seen the man with a woman that same afternoon. They were out by the pumps, and he was gassing up their car.
He was drunk, Doocie said. I had smelled booze on him when he came in to order a coffee. He went out, and I followed. It was my break, and I had to smoke outside, because of one of those new regulations. Anyway, he was out there pumping, but he kept knocking things around as if he couldn’t see straight, which he probably couldn’t. He just could not get the nozzle into the tank. The woman got out of the car and told him to cut the shit. He waved the nozzle at her, yelling. You cut the shit, he said. You’re the one who should cut the shit.
Suit yourself, she told him. I made myself clear, and whatever happens next is up to you.
And then, Doocie?
He turned to me, she said, dropping her voice to a whisper. To me—who was just standing there. And he starts to shout, Put that goddamned cigarette out before I kill you. I did just what I was told, which was a damned good thing because he immediately started pouring gas all around, on the asphalt, all over the rear tire, and finally he splashed her, just a little at first, wetting her tennis shoes. Then in one jerk, he splashed her to her knees, soaking her legs and the hem of her skirt. Now she was yelling, what a loser he was, she’d always known it, and what the hell did he think he was doing, things of that nature.
He had a book of matches, and he started lighting them. He threw the lit matches in her direction. They fell to the ground, only just missing her. She unbuttoned her top and took it off, started blotting her legs with it. She was still telling him off, but I didn’t hear the words. He replaced the nozzle. The girl looked at him, and he must have told her to get in the car, because that’s what she did, and he calmed right down, and they drove off. That night I didn’t see them come back, but I heard the shot. She came flying out of the room, shouting, Call the cops! A few weeks later, I was summoned to testify. The guy on the phone just now—that was my brother, he’s a lawyer. I told him what I told them, what I’m telling you. I don’t know if she killed him. If she did, though, it wasn’t less than what he deserved.
I chewed my toast. I accepted a refill. You think they’ll convict? I wondered.
I don’t know, Doocie said. Her shoes were recovered from the scene. I could smell the gas from the witness box.
A month later, I was home again in New Preston, but part of me remained at the diner, Doocie’s whispers still quick in my ear. That was when I realized I could make my own version— and perhaps, by doing so, defang it, clear it from my system.
I cut openings out of plywood sheets and hammered them together to make a room. I turned a metal hinge into a door and slotted in a rectangle of glass for a window. While walking around the neighborhood, I found a powder-blue scrap of wool washed to felt, just large enough to fit a miniature queen-size mattress. I wired a tiny Tiffany lamp and set it on a dollhouse night table. At a rummage sale, I found a toy soldier’s rifle and a pair of doll-sized tennis shoes. I took a jointed balsa-wood mannequin, one of those that’s in every art supply store, and stuck it in the little bed beneath the coverlet, pressing the head into a miniature pillow crusted with dark-red nail polish. I used more nail polish to create a blood spatter. The next time I filled my tank, I let gas spill into a container along with the tiny tennis shoes. Once they’d dried, I set them on the replica carpet, wondering where they might have been found at the real scene of the crime.
As I worked, possibilities presented themselves. So many different things might have gone down in that room. A lot depended on the shape of the spatter and the position of the gun as it went off. I tangled the gun in string, to suggest what the girlfriend had said—that he’d killed himself—and set it on the floor where it might have fallen if her story were true. Then I shifted it again, to account for the possibility that his girlfriend had pulled the trigger and merely set things up to suggest a suicide. I repositioned that gun again and again.
I added stuff, too, bits and pieces that weren’t in the room I’d shared with Harry but had personal meaning: Instead of the velvet bluebirds, I created a replica of a touristy painting of an attraction near New Preston, a rocky outcropping shaped like a man’s face in profile. In place of the tourist brochures for Bonneville, I made advertisements for Quarry Lake, a chasm filled with water as cold as it was deep, where kids from all over the region drowned every year, and even so, no one closed the place. Harry and I used to swim there sometimes, on August nights when New Preston’s heat became truly unbearable.
A librarian helped me find newspaper accounts of the crime and the trial. As it turned out, the judge had ruled on a technicality—someone at the police station had lost track of the woman’s shoes, rupturing the chain of custody. Without the shoes, there was no case; the woman on trial could not be definitively placed at the scene. Case dismissed.
I didn’t so much finish the diorama as set it aside. It remained in my studio for a long time, the glow of that tiny Tiffany lamp brightening a dark corner. Something about the piece felt too intimate, like I’d violated a taboo by mixing art so closely with the stuff of life and death. But I recently had reason to revisit that decision, and so I brought the box to Bobby, an art school friend who now runs a gallery called the Roach. In the main room, I set The Blue Bedroom on an empty plinth, so the diorama was at eye level. Bobby paced around, peering in from every angle, and I told him the story from start to finish, including what Erica had written after I emailed her a photograph and an update about the work: Heaven in a wild flower, paradise in a grain of sand.
Bobby pulled the thread I’d attached to the miniature blinds and gasped when they lifted. He looked through the clear plate-glass window and met my gaze on the other side.
Make me a few more, he said, and you’ll finally have your solo show.
