Customer Reviews

Killing Time in St. Cloud

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The prologue of this book takes place in St. Cloud, MN on Prom night, 1976. Then the authors fast forward to the Christmas Season, 1988 and slowly, in multi-layered character exposition "like time through an hour glass," tell the reader what everyone has been up to in the intervening years.

Like Stephen King's Carrie, it observes high school foibles: "You've been away too long, Charlie. I'll tell you something. There is no life after high school. Not in this town. The grown up world is just high school with money." That statement rings true. Those who remain in town appear to be locked in a sort of "time warp." They maintain the harsh high school cliqued pecking order in which they were, and are, mired and "pigeon hole" returnees in their long-ago station.

I found myself wondering if I had been mistaken about the genre as I was reading the first part of the book. The dead body at the center of the who-dun-it murder mystery doesn't even appear until page 167 of this 300 page work. So, for the first half of the book, the story is soap operatic a la "As St. Cloud Turns" - but that could be anticipated in a book co-authored by Judith Guest, who also penned "Ordinary People." The unsympathetic mother character played by Mary Tyler Moore in the Robert Redford movie of that book has aged a bit and now appears as a mother/grandmother in St. Cloud.

Remember old-fashioned roller coasters? When the ride starts and your car is slowly being hauled up the first incline from whence centrifugal force and gravity take over? That's what the first part of this book feels like. Once "up top" it's time to "Hang on folks, we're in for a bumpy ride." When this book gets going, it is intriguing.

Judith Guest's "Ordinary People" was a very good first novel. I read her second one ("Second Heaven" - not very good) when it was first released and then I lost track of her. I also see she has another book called "Errands," which I also recently purchased.

I didn't know this book, "Killing Time in St. Cloud," existed until a month ago. I knew nothing about the story or the co-author, but it was Judith Guest so I read it. Until the antagonist dies in the last third of the book, I had no idea it was supposed to be a mystery. Up until that point, I keep asking myself: Where are we going with this? I don't think the story was all that involving and the characters were not particular interesting. That said, however, I do like the fact that all the people in the novel were flawed and/or had some skeletons in their closets. In some ways, it evokes the atmosphere of a small town and the inhabitants who remained (or returned) after high school. However, I didn't feel a connection to any of the characters - none were likeable or remotely interesting.

The writing vacillates between good and fair and the plotting is good. The story and characters, however, were fairly dull.