In her lengthy career, multiple-award-winning author Rendell has written about teenagers, the lonely, the lovelorn, the disturbed, the violated, and the just plain evil. This time she turns her keen eye on the elderly: how they manage the present, look toward the future, and, especially, remember the past. The story begins in the 1940s. After murdering his wife and her lover, a man buries their two joined hands in a tin box, deep in tunnels where his son and a group of other young children gather. There it stays for 60 years until a construction company unearths it. Such an old crime invites little interest from police until a link is discovered to an elderly man who lives in the area. As one of the children who played in the tunnels, the man volunteers to bring together the others, now mostly in their seventies, to see if anyone can help authorities. New information isn't forthcoming, but the reunion sparks old rivalries, loves, and disappointments that change the lives of everyone in the group. Using her customary spare yet decorous style and measured pace, Rendell, now in her 80s, beautifully and carefully individualizes each member of her ensemble cast, at the same time creating not a grim reminder of mortality but a picture of moribund lives renewed.
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