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A crime IN THE NEIGHBORHOOD BY SUZANNE BERNE ALGONQUIN BOOKS | 285 PAGES FICTION BY MAUD CASEY | in 1972, it sometimes felt like everyone was getting a divorce -- even the country was going through a nasty breakup. Suzanne Berne probes this cultural moment in her first novel, "A Crime in the Neighborhood," the story of a too-cozy Washington, D.C., suburb rent by the murder of a 12-year-old boy while one family splits apart during the summer of the Watergate break-ins. These concentric circles of lawlessness -- adultery inside the local terror inside the cheating heart of national politics -- play nicely off one another and save this from being yet another child-of-divorce story. Marsha (whose name alone seems to embody the era) is the 10-year-old narrator whose father runs off with her mother's sister, leaving Marsha with a newly single and suddenly evasive mother turned home telemarketer. Meanwhile, Marsha's ruthless teenage twin siblings call her "Martian" and feign foppish British accents. Things only get worse when the local boy is murdered. Marsha, with justifiable paranoia, turns spy, and through the foggy lens of childhood keeps track of all neighborhood activity -- murder-related and otherwise -- in a book she aptly names "Evidence." Berne gets a child's logic absolutely right. To Marsha, everything is linked -- her father's initial crime of leaving has somehow led to the local murder, which has somehow made a crook out of Richard Nixon. Marsha is a curious, angry kid, at an age where everything seems mysterious and terrifying -- her mother's naked body looks like a mannequin with a "grim bristle of hair," a childless bachelor who moves in next door is repulsive because he flirts with her mother. She wants answers, and the theater of the suburbs -- someone arriving home from work, a screen door slamming shut, children playing, a conversation between her mother and the neighbor -- becomes fodder for Marsha's sleuthing until, ultimately, she fingers someone for the murder of the boy. It's not the truth, but there's truth in it -- a child who accuses someone wrongly because everything else is going wrong. But the reductive logic of childhood loses its affecting charm when it carries over into adulthood, and that's what happens here. The novel is retrospectively narrated by the grown-up Marsha, and she doesn't offer much in the way of mature perspective. Ten-year-old Marsha is deliciously creepy, and she does a lot of damage to the accused, but that's understandable -- she's 10. Grown-up Marsha seems defensive, as if she can't understand or forgive her child self for crossing the line. Years later, when she drives by the house of the person she's accused, she says, "My life seemed bound to his in a way I couldn't explain and didn't want to." The adult narrator still has that "Evidence" book, and it makes you wonder what all those notes were for if not to explain. Sept. 4, 1997 Maud Casey lives in Brooklyn. Her fiction has appeared in the Threepenny Review and The Georgia Review. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html