Every Friday Book Beginnings on Friday is hosted by Gillion at Rose City Reader where you can share the first sentence (or so) of the book you are reading. You can also share from a book you want to highlight just because it caught your fancy.

I’m featuring The Girl Next Door by Ruth Rendell, one of my TBRs, a book that’s been sitting on my bookshelves since 2016. It’s one of her later novels, a stand-alone book.

Chapter One:

He was a handsome man. A handsome boy, his mother called him, because she started praising his looks when he was five.

Also every Friday there is The Friday 56, hosted by Freda at Freda’s Voice, but she is taking a break and Anne at My Head is Full of Books has taken on hosting duties in her absence. You grab a book and turn to page 56 (or 56% of an eBook), find one or more interesting sentences (no spoilers), and post them.

Unlike other users of Baldwin’s Hill, who were afraid of pregnancy or, in the case of the girls, of not being virgins when they were married, he and Daphne went ‘all the way’, as the phrase had it. She didn’t get pregnant, though he had done nothing to prevent it.

Description from Amazon UK

Beneath the green meadows of Loughton, Essex, a dark network of tunnels has been dug. A group of children discover them. They play there. It becomes their place.

Seventy years on, the world has changed. Developers have altered the rural landscape. Friends from a half-remembered world have married, died, grown sick, moved – or disappeared.

Work on a new house called Warlock uncovers a long buried grisly secret: the bones of two severed hands are discovered in a box, and an investigation into a long-buried crime of passion begins.

The friends, who played together as children, begin to question their past. And a weary detective, more concerned with current crimes, must investigate a case of murder.