Just Finished Reading The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell

The Girl Next Door is a 2014 novel by English mystery writer Ruth Rendell, the last to be published before her death.  It's one of those stories that start out going in one direction but transform into something substantially different.  In 1944 in an English town the children there like to play in the "tunnels" underneath a hillside...eventually revealed to be an unconstructed house's foundation.  Michael, one of the kids, has as parents a mother who carries out sexual escapades with various men and a father who by all measures is a pure psychopath...one day he decides to murder his wife and her lover, cut off their hands and save them in a tin box...pretty gross and disturbing, right?  I don't think I'm giving away the story, though, as this all happens in the beginning.  After ridding himself of his wife, the father ships Michael away for his sister Zoe to take care of...the story then shifts sixty years into the future as the children are now around 70 and the creepy old dad is approaching 100, living in a luxurious senior's home after living his whole adult life off the labors and inheritances of others.  The bulk of the rest of the book deals with the relationships between these elderly "tunnel children": besides Michael there is the "girl next door", Daphne, who attracts Alan...one of those tunnel kids and a later teenage flame...into leaving his longtime wife Rosemary for her.  There are other subplots with other characters, but the essence of the story is the lives of the grown children, now on the other end of their life spans.  It lays forth the notion that life goes on with all its complications and drama far into old age...I'm not sure what to think about this since I'm 64 now!  As for my reaction to the novel, I didn't particularly like Rendell's emphasis of the relationships in all their tawdriness over the story's underlying murder mystery...the tone reminded me of J.K. Rowling's "adult" novel The Casual Vacancy:  is this a kind of "English" thing in fiction?  Ruth Rendell's novels are pretty much split in number between her standalone books and those in the Inspector Wexford murder mystery series: I think I'll focus more on the latter category in the future...