Soho
Published May 5, 2026
Reviewed by Barbara Fister
Hannah Cooke, who goes by Cookie, is an interior decorator with highly-refined tastes and strong opinions about which shade of white is the right one for a particular room. When she isn’t dealing with home renovations, she builds homes of her own, miniature ones, filled with details of past crime scenes. She thinks she has landed a plum job when a wealthy couple hire her to renovate a grand old home, but she soon uncovers a lot of problems: a secret room with strange Egyptian motifs painted on the wall, a crumbling chimney that will be hard to repair, and her clients’ marriage, which is on the rocks. After one of the couple is murdered, a detective on the case asks her to build a miniature of the house she’s been renovating, convinced it will lead to a solution.
So far, so intriguing. There’s a lot going on in this ambitious novel. Cookie may have excellent taste in drapes and paint samples, but her taste in men is chaotic. The only craftsman who could possibly fix the crumbling chimney is a volatile man she was briefly married to, and she has the bad judgement to respond to the attentions of the doctor who is one of her clients, starting a torrid affair. There’s something nefarious going on at the doctor’s hospital, where patients keep dying. and the wife’s textile business seems dodgy. Then there’s the strange vials stored in the refrigerator, and a psychoanalytic therapist whose office needs redecorating, but who is somehow connected to the troubled hospital – and seems to be also one of Cookie’s dubious romantic choices. It’s a bit like the old house: every time you poke something, a new complexity surfaces, and everything that seems fine on the surface is actually hiding problems.
The author can really write, and Cookie is a fascinating character. But with so much thrown into the narrative mix – the miniature crime scenes, the past marriage and present menace of her unbalanced ex, the suspicious goings on at the hospital and in the client’s textile business, and finally a dramatic scene at a therapists’ conference in the mountains beside a huge quarry – it doesn’t all come together.
As Cookie reflects, “when you’ve gone down the wrong road, it’s never too late to get off it. The problem is knowing whether the road you’re on is the wrong one in the first place.” Josefowicz has drawn an ambitious and intricate map, full of possibilities, but most of them dwindle away without meeting up and without a clear destination.