“Hey, it’s July and you’re talking about January and February books?” Yeah, guilty as charged. March, April, and May, too. Oh, and I missed a bunch of columns–and books, which is the truly sad part–in the second half of 2025. Let’s just say that 2025 turned into a dark thing, yeah? Good news is, I’m out of that hole and doing a lot of the things that make me happy, and two of those things are reading crime fiction and talking to you about it. Let’s do that. Article continues after advertisement
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All the Little Houses by May Cobb
(Sourcebooks Landmark)
For a long time, May Cobb was the only author who could make me care about the lives of the rich and their little peccadilloes. A bit of that came from the healthy doses of chaos, sex, bad intentions, secret agendas, awful people, and murder that Cobb injects into every book, but it mostly has to do with the way Cobb spins a yarn and her ability to humanize even the most despicable people in order to explore humanity while everyone gets hammered. In any case, I said a shorter, probably far more eloquent version of that before and it became a blurb on one of her previous novels. This is all to say I expected to like All the Little Houses, but had no clue it would become one of my favorite Cobb novels.
