The Girl Next Door: A Novel

"After spotting a few of 84-year-old British novelist Ruth Rendell’s books on my desk, a co-worker recently asked, “You still read her?” as if we are supposed to give up reading our favorite authors simply because they’re prolific. And Rendell is certainly prolific. If my count is correct, this is her 65th book. On the surface, it’s a mystery about the present-day discovery of a long-buried tin box with the skeletal remains of two hands inside (one belonging to a man, the other to a woman). As with so much of Rendell’s work, what matters is the psychological tangle underneath the surface. In this case, it’s a group of men and women who, as children, played together in the fields of a London neighborhood where the tin was buried during World War II. But the crime isn’t the star here; it’s the childhood friends who are pulled back together decades later, and the tremendous capacity for growth and change some of them show even well into their “golden years.”"