The Great Houses of Pill Hill

Oh, how I wanted to love Diane Josefowicz’s The Great Houses of Pill Hill. The protagonist, Cookie Cooke (why?), is an interior decorator with a fascination with Lizzie Borden and the recreation of crime scenes. Using her ample artistic talent, she recreates famous crime scenes in miniature, which, on its own, would be so cool. I wish the book had been about her use of that skill to help solve a crime, but, alas, she has an affair with a married man whose house she’s renovating. That old story.

There are some lovely moments of description in this book as relates to old houses, thus the three-star review. If you’re a sucker for historic homes with hidden secrets, you’ll get some bang for your buck. But, you’ll also get far too many characters, secondary storylines that don’t make logical sense, and a deep disdain for Cookie, who makes increasingly stupid decisions.

All of that aside, though, this has all the markings of a limited series premise: beautiful old New England homes, healthcare fraud, 19th century Egyptian occultist practices, and a murder…or two? Or three?