Release date: January 20, 2026
Publisher: Sourcebooks Landmark
Genre: Mystery/Thriller
Synopsis:
Adults can behave badly too…
It’s the mid-1980s in the tiny town of Longview, Texas. Nellie Anderson, the beautiful daughter of the Anderson family dynasty, has burst onto the scene. She always gets what she wants. What she can’t get for herself… well, that’s what her mother is for. Because Charleigh Andersen, blond, beautiful, and ruthlessly cunning, remembers all too well having to claw her way to the top. When she was coming of age on the poor side of East Texas, she was a loser, an outcast, humiliated, and shunned by the in-crowd, whose approval she’d so desperately thirsted for. When a prairie-kissed family moves to town, all trad wife, woodworking dad, wholesome daughter vibes, Charleigh’s entire self-made social empire threatens to crumble. Who will be left standing when the dust settles?
From the author of The Hunting Wives comes a deliciously wicked new thriller about mean girls, mean moms, and the delicious secrets inside all the little houses.
Review:
All the Little Houses by May Cobb is sinfully fun, wickedly delicious, and completely unhinged in the best way. Set in the sweltering heat of 1980s East Texas, this story drops you into a small town where everyone is watching everyone else—and absolutely no one is behaving well. Told through multiple POVs in short, addictive chapters, the book reads like whispered gossip passed across a backyard fence, except every secret is darker, messier, and more scandalous than the last. It opens with a body floating in the water and keeps you deliciously unsettled by refusing to tell you who’s dead until the very end.
At the center of it all is Charleigh Anderson: beautiful, ruthless, and determined to protect the social empire she clawed her way into. When a seemingly wholesome, prairie kissed family arrives in town—trad wife vibes, woodworking dad, perfect daughter—the carefully curated hierarchy of Longview starts to crack. What follows is a soapy, twisty spiral of jealousy, power plays, sexual tension, and morally gray decisions, where mothers and daughters alike prove that adults can behave very badly. Everyone is messy. Everyone has secrets. And watching it all implode is pure reading pleasure.
This book is juicy, gossipy, and wildly addictive, equal parts scandal and suspense. The 1980s setting adds a sticky, sunburned intensity that amplifies every bad decision, and the pacing never lets up. And that final sentence? Absolute perfection. The kind that makes you stare at the wall afterward and immediately demand more. I would happily read ten sequels about these terrible, fascinating people and their beautifully disastrous lives.
Overall rating: 5/5
Thanks to the publisher for my review copy.
Novelgossip 