THE GREAT HOUSES OF PILL HILL

What looks at first like a sedate locked-room puzzle blossoms into a full-blown conspiracy yarn featuring a most unlikely heroine.

Hannah “Cookie” Cooke is a New England–based interior designer whose two specialties are constructing painstaking scale models of crime scenes like the Lizzie Borden house, which doesn’t pay much, and restoring upscale houses, which pays a lot more. Her business, the Ministry of the Interior, gets a commission from neurosurgeon Chuck Halsey and his wife, Lana, founder of Lana Pura home textiles, which is challenging from the get-go. Lana’s determination to enlarge the house’s kitchen is thwarted by the placement of its chimney, which can’t be touched because it’s integral to the whole structure. Together with mason Harry Deluca, who has a complicated history with her, Cookie devises a workaround, but it doesn’t work well enough to prevent the kitchen from filling with smoke. None of this bothers Chuck, whose affair with Cookie ends when he’s found stuffed into the chimney and burned to death after his housewarming party. Will Cookie ever get another job? Absolutely: hospital Communications Director Wendy Teller insists she update the office of her husband, psychiatrist Simon Teller. Simon himself has no interest in the project, but he’s definitely interested in Cookie. As Cookie’s unsettlingly adulterous pattern solidifies, the ensuing complications extend from a second death to an international drug smuggling scheme to a reopening of the Lizzie Borden case. Some readers will feel exalted and uplifted by these wide horizons; others will merely feel baffled.

A game whose rules keep changing provides something for everyone, even if it’s not completely fulfilling for anyone.