The Girl Before, The Girl After By Miriam Kramer Every month I hopscotch across diverse genres to find the books I review. I gravitate towards psychological thrillers, preferably set in the United Kingdom or Ireland with a dark, chilly edge. J.P. Delaney’s The Girl Before fit that bill, so I dove into it recently on a rainy night. Buzzfeed culture writer Scaachi Koul’s One Day We’ll All Be Dead and None of This Will Matter also attracted me because I crave sarcastic, funny essays of any kind, particularly if they enrich my perspectives on contemporary pop culture. In The Girl Before, two troubled women speak of looking for London lodging after personal trauma. Emma, the one before, has been robbed in the flat she shares with her boyfriend Simon. Years later, Jane is recovering from bearing a stillborn baby. Both are looking for a fresh start somewhere else to lick their wounds. Edward Monkford, a prize-winning architect, is offering his minimalist London masterpiece for the price of a moderate apartment to a handpicked tenant. Applicants for One Folgate Street must pass a test and an interview to live in an exquisitely calibrated home with pale stone walls, a Buddhist-inspired garden, high ceilings, and iconic modern furnishings. In this house technology works with physical design to create atmosphere and mood with temperature, light, and even water temperature tuned to a tenant’s rhythms. When chosen, both Emma and her boyfriend in the past and Jane in the present must decide whether to pay a personal price on top of the low rent. In taking the architect’s psychometric test, they must address statements such as “Please make a list of every possession you consider essential to your life” or “When I’m working on something, I can’t relax until…