INCLUDES AN EXCERPT OF RENDELL’S FINAL NOVEL, DARK Edges

From crime story Ruth Rendell, a psychologically intriguing book about an old murder that sends shockwaves across a group of astonishingly carnal and appetiteful elderly friends: “Refined, probing, and intelligent…never less than a satisfaction” (USA TODAY).

In the waning months of the next World War, several children discover a tunnel in their neighborhood outside London. For this summer season of 1944, the subterranean space turns into about THE LADY Next Door: A Book their “secret garden,” where in fact the friends play games, show their fortunes, and perform for each other.

Six decades later, construction workers produce a grisly discovery beneath a house on a single property: a tin package containing two skeletal hands, one male and one female. As the hands make nationwide news, the friends come together once more, to recall their long ago days for a detective. Then your police analysis sputters, as well as the threads keeping their friendship collectively start to unravel. Is the truth buried amid the tangled human relationships of these ageing women and men and their memories? Does it emerge before it’s as well late?

Stephen Ruler says, “nobody surpasses Ruth Rendell when it comes to stories of obsession, instability, and malignant coincidence.” In The Girl Next Door-“yet another jewel” (The Washington Post)-Rendell brilliantly implies that the options people make, and the emotions behind them, remain as potent in late life because they had been in youth. “Rendell’s wit, often mordant, hasn’t been sharper than when she skewers patronizing assumptions about the elderly” (Chicago Tribune).