The Neighbors Are Watching, by Debra Ginsberg

Ginsberg wrote two amazing books, The Grift, which was original and complusively readable, and Blind Submission, which was clever and insightful.  Then she wrote this dreary, cliched, uninspired look at suburban life, where nothing is what it seems, and every person's life is tetering on the brink of destruction, or self-destruction.  We have shady pasts, drug-dealing teens, drunken housewives, lesbians stripped of their children by powerful husbands, affairs, prostitution, unwed teen mothers, and even death.  It lacked the wit and rapid pace of her previous books, and was a bit of a torment to finish.