Sourcebooks
Published September 16, 2025
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Detective Constable Ffion Morgan is frustrated. Her landlord has given her a month to find a new place to live, but the real estate agent who should be bringing her a contract on a new house keeps avoiding her calls. Her opinion of estate agents isn’t very high when she’s landed with a new case: a body found upside down in a kayak. The victim was an estate agent, one of a group that has been holding a corporate retreat at a holiday rental in Wales, and they seem to be a hard-drinking, competitive bunch. While she works on her case in Wales, her boyfriend Leo, a detective sergeant on the English side of the border begins investigating a set of strange burglaries at The Hill, a neighborhood of luxury homes. Meanwhile, everyone is obsessed with a popular podcast that’s attempting to solve a years-old murder case. As often happens in mysteries, if less frequently in real life, these cases gradually become braided together.
Ffion is an impulsive, instinctive detective who is prone to getting ahead of her superiors to follow a lead. She’s also hesitant about her relationship with Leo. While they spend evenings at each others’ houses, she’s reluctant to move into his house to solve her real estate problem; she worries they might break up, and it would be messy. Leo is a steadier, calmer presence who has no doubt their relationship is solid, even if he has yet to introduce Ffion to his seven-year-old son. His ex, Allie, is jealous and resentful and has put her foot down: the boy is not to have any contact with that woman. When by accident they do meet, Ffion’s spirited dog frightens the boy, and that makes Allie even more determined to keep them apart.
Leo isn’t the only one interested in the burglaries on The Hill. Allie, who lives around the corner from the exclusive neighborhood, is convinced she’s part of the community and is desperate to impress the women there by seeking out knock-off furnishings and clothes that she thinks look just like the real thing, insinuating herself into their lives by volunteering to help with a jumble sale and arranging play dates between her son and a child who lives there. While her cringing attempts to fit in frustrate Leo, her constant presence gives readers some valuable information about the burgled residents as the case turns into a murder investigation.
This third entry in the series nods to traditional mysteries that depend on a cast of characters living in a closed society. There’s even a map to help keep the residents of The Hill straight. Most of them are wealthy snobs, and the estate agents involved in Ffion’s case are generally greedy and unprincipled people, so the focus is on the puzzle rather than on the effects of crime. Ffion and Leo are nicely complex characters, and Allie, while appallingly self-deceiving and needy, provides insight into the draw of wealth and luxury and its ultimate shallowness. Though the setting is established through a sprinkling of Welsh words and phrases (and Leo’s stumbling attempts to learn the language), the focus is on a community obsessed with materialism and appearances, as well as on the evolving relationship between the two protagonists, with a development in the final pages that seems to promise a sequel.
While Other People’s Houses doesn’t break new ground, it’s an entertaining puzzle in a traditional vein.