The Great Houses of Pill Hill

Josefowicz (Guardians and Saints) delivers an intriguing if unfocused blend of locked-room puzzle, suburban noir, and cerebral meditation on the power of material objects. Hannah “Cookie” Cooke is a fine artist turned interior designer in New England with a sideline in building detailed dioramas of murder scenes for local police. Cookie’s latest interior design client is Chuck Halsey, who has purchased a fixer-upper in the once desirable, now up-and-coming neighborhood of Pill Hill with his wife, Lana. During the housewarming party where Cookie plans to unveil her work, Chuck winds up dead, and the detective assigned to the case plans to draw on Cookie’s diorama skills to help ferret out the culprit. Soon, however, the novel veers off course, with a focus on the sexual triangle between Cookie, Chuck, and Lana distracting from rather than complementing the core investigation. Then Cookie’s aging archaeologist mother crashes into the narrative when a pseudo-Egyptian frieze in the Halseys’ home becomes a possible clue. Josefowicz displays admirable ambition in attempting to join together the plot’s many fragments, but the result is more messy than satisfying. This misses the mark. (May)