A NEIGHBOR'S GUIDE TO MURDER

Apartment-building tensions lead to death.

The latest by the author of Our House (2018) returns to the territory of upscale London real estate for a meandering tale of class, gender, generational, and financial conflict. Elderly, opinionated Gwen Healy lives with her unemployed son in one of 32 apartments at Columbia Mansions. Gwen, whose “unburdening” makes up the body of the novel, insists she’s not a busybody, but the evidence contradicts her. Her favorite form of exercise is jumping to conclusions, and it gets her, and those around her, into trouble again and again. Much of that conclusion-jumping has to do with her despised next-door neighbor, one-hit wonder rock star Alec Pedley, who makes a habit of renting out his second bedroom to young women. When Gwen takes a particular liking to one of them, the fey Pixie, she gets in over her head making accusations against Alec, and finds herself deep in a libel case. Candlish uses the fact that Gwen is an inexperienced writer (“I’m not a skilled storyteller, as you will have gathered. I have little control over the pace of this thing”) as an excuse for the novel’s leisurely structure and frequent digressions, but that’s little comfort for the reader looking for action and consistency. The novel has a lot to say about sexual exploitation, journalistic overstepping, the British housing crisis, and disregard for those getting on in years. It offers welcome touches of comic relief, mostly in the form of Gwen’s acid critiques of phenomena like “lurid-colored juice,” and Candlish is a master of late-in-the-narrative twists. But the overall tone is depressingly sour, and as a narrator, Gwen evokes a queasy mixture of pity and distaste.

A lesser but still diverting effort from a socially concerned suspense novelist.