Mary Beth Keane’s new novel, centered around two New York City cops who meet at the police academy in the early 1970s and later wind up as neighbors in suburbia, explores how unanticipated life events can peel back layers of friendship, test family allegiances, and force a reckoning about once taboo subjects like mental illness. Keane has been compared in style and perspective to Ann Patchett, and like Patchett she uses the ordinary aspects of ordinary people’s lives to expose experiences and truths that likely haunt most families. Her treatment of a main character with mental illness is especially brave and compassionate, and very intense.