The Girl Next Door

INCLUDES AN EXCERPT OF RENDELLS FINAL NOVEL, DARK CORNERS From crime legend Ruth Rendell, a psychologically intriguing novel about an old murder that sends shockwaves across a group of astonishingly carnal and appetiteful elderly friends: Refined, probing, and intelligentnever less than a pleasure (USA TODAY). In the waning months of the second World War, a group of children discover a tunnel in their neighborhood outside London. For that summer of 1944, the subterranean space becomes their secret garden, where the friends play games, tell their fortunes, and perform for each other. Six decades later, construction workers make a grisly discovery beneath a house on the same land: a tin box containing two skeletal hands, one male and one female. As the hands make national news, the friends come together once again, to recall their long ago days for a detective. Then the police investigation sputters, and the threads holding their friendship