So all three, terrified to being linked to those skeletons, indulge in regretful, defensive, bitter flashbacks to What Happened that summer-when Adam picked up a new girlfriend, unstable Zosie, a recent unwed mother (forced to give up her baby) and teen runaway. Shiva Manjusri, who was a promising student with hopes of upward mobility when he came to the commune with idealistic girlfriend Vivien Goldman, is now content with his shabby, ghetto-ized life. His pal Rufus Fletcher, who was a hedonistic medical student back in '76, is now a respectable, married gynecologist. Adam is now married, the doting father of a baby girl. And news of this discovery unhinges three Londoners who have not spoken to each other for a decade, not since that fatal summer of 1976, when 19-year-old Adam Verne-Smith-heir to Wyvis Hail-decided to turn the place into a secret mini-commune. Two unidentified skeletons-belonging to a young woman and a baby girl-have just been found in a pet cemetery at Wyvis Hall, a Suffolk estate. And again, though Rendell's rich, ironic narration and splendidly detailed characterization provide absorbing reading, the story that ultimately emerges is only half-convincing-and hardly worthy of the long, coy buildup. Very much like last year's Edgar-winning A Dark-Adapted Eye, this second ""Barbara Vine"" novel (a Ruth Rendell pseudonym) deals with a bygone crime remembered, guiltily stewed over, and revealed bit by bit to the reader: a what-happened? rather than a whodunit.
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