A Crime In the Neighborhood.

... A Crime In the Neighborhood It was the summer of 1972 when Spring Hill, a Washington, D.C., suburb, got its first taste of an increasingly violent, insecure modern world. The quiet residential area, whose inhabitants traditionally left their doors unlocked and spent the summers attending one another's cookout, was rocked by the news that 12-year-old Boyd Ellison had been raped and murdered, his body dumped behind the local mall. While shaken residents organized a neighborhood watch program and clued detectives in on anyone's suspicious behavior, the inhabitants of at least one house were distracted by a tragedy of their own: 10-year-old Marsha Eberhardt's father, Larry, had run off with his sister-in-law, leaving his wife and three children to manage on their own. Marsha, stunned by her father's abandonment and having broken her ankle, spends the summer witnessing her mother's desperate attempts to cope, the neighborhood's paranoid response to the murder and even the country's disorientation over the unfolding Watergate scandal. The

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