Debra Ginsberg is one of those novelists for whom I’ve happily become a literary evangelist: I’ve given her books to friends, I write about them every chance I get, and I enjoy vicarious thrills when I see them getting rave reviews.

Her last book, the deliciously twisty “The Grift,” was a 2008 New York Times notable book, and her first novel, 2006’s “Blind Submission,” remains my all-time favorite fictional take on the publishing industry. Ginsberg has also written a couple of dynamite memoirs.

With her latest, “The Neighbors Are Watching,” I find myself asking once again: This woman is not yet a superstar because … ? Her gifts for on-the-button characterization and wry observation get stronger with each novel, and “Neighbors” offers the kind of reading that’ll keep you up all night — and then have you gazing at your own neighbors with perhaps a tad more interest than usual the next morning.

The book is set amid the backdrop of the deadly 2007 wildfires that forced evacuation of half a million San Diego residents. A pregnant 17-year-old, Diana Jones, shows up on her father’s doorstep not long before the conflagration.

Diana’s mere existence comes as a surprise to Joe’s wife, Allison, and it doesn’t help that he has refused to indulge Allison’s desire to have a child. (Oh, you already had one? Mental smackdown!)

Diana takes up with a neighbor boy named Kevin, son of Dorothy Werner. Dorothy, heavily involved in the neighborhood association, takes her duties as watch-meerkat far too seriously, seeing things that she shouldn’t with alarming regularity (and it’s not as if she doesn’t have a few secrets of her own).

Kevin, it’s implied, has bad-boy tendencies. As Allison, a teacher, ponders, “She couldn’t understand how Dick and Dorothy Werner maintained their holier-than-thou attitude considering they’d raised that kid, Kevin. Just naming a kid Kevin was asking for trouble. Allison knew from experience that the Kevins in her class were always going to be troublemakers.”

That kind of illogical but all-too-common thinking permeates “Neighbors,” making it both hilarious and cautionary. When Diana disappears after the wildfire evacuations, leaving her newborn infant behind, secrets and suspicions come boiling to the surface, threatening to scald everyone in their wake. Was she murdered? Did she run away? Everyone’s a suspect.

One of the most fascinating aspects of “Neighbors” is Ginsberg’s refusal to tarry long with any single protagonist. Instead, we get to peer inside the minds of everyone in the book at some point, from the nominally central characters of Joe, Allison, Diana and Kevin to just about everyone in the neighborhood.

It’s like a block party where you get to hear what everyone else is thinking. They’re not marketing this as a scary thriller, but honestly, that’s just about the most frightening thing I can imagine.

If there is any literary justice, Ginsberg soon will be a huge star. This might be your last chance to say, “I knew her when.”

 

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