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Summary
Author Notes
Judith Guest was born in Detroit in 1936. She earned a degree in Education from the University of Michigan. She has been a schoolteacher in Detroit.
With no formal training in fiction writing, novelist Judith Guest began to write fiction and poetry when her youngest son started school. Her highly acclaimed first novel, Ordinary People, was published in 1976 and has since been published in 13 languages. It was made into a film, directed by Robert Redford, which received the Academy Award for best picture in 1980. Guest's subsequent works include Second Heaven (1982), Killing Time in St. Cloud (1988), Errands (1997) and The Tarnished Eye (2004).
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Mingling a suspenseful plot with homely domestic details and a perfectly calibrated sense of atmosphere and placea small Minnesota town in the grip of bone-chilling winterthe authors of this engaging mystery collaboration have produced a solidly commercial novel. When charming psychopath Nick Uhler returns to his hometown of St. Cloud after a 12-year absence, he precipitates a series of deaths and initiates an irrevocable process in which old, unsavory secrets are revealed. Ruthlessly manipulating his former high school lover, Elizabeth, now married to surgeon Simon Carmody and in her ninth month of pregnancy, drug dealer Nick generates tragic tensions among three old-time St. Cloud families: the Fallons, (Elizabeth's domineering father Terry, weak-willed brother Tom and his devout wife Jeannie); the Carmodys (Simon's termagant mother Nellie and his brother, Charlie, who ``has a history of a very short temper and very bad luck''); and the Voigts (sad, vulnerable Marty and her gruff father Boz). United by their Catholic faith and the emotional legacies of the hard-drinking older generation, and bound by the memories of their high school years, these characters are set in confrontation by deputy sheriff Bill Hessel, an old friend of Nick and Charlie's. The prose style here is more Guest (Ordinary People , Second Heaven) than Hill, whose novels Blue Rise and Among Birches are more subtle, sensitive explorations of human relationships. But the combination works quite well, and this fast-paced novel begs to be read in one sitting. Major ad/promo; Mystery Guild main selection; Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club selections. (November) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Guest (Ordinary People; Second Heaven) and Hill (an equally adroit dissector of family relationships, cf. Blue Rise) poke, prod, and vandalize psyches in the small town of St. Cloud, where it turns out, almost no one is fit to cast the first stone. When Nick Uhler abandons Chicago and returns to St. Cloud for the first time since high school, someone's upset enough about it to bash in his head and dump him into the river. Nick's longtime scapegoat Charlie Carmody (a frame-up sent him to jail while Nick got off scot-free) is the prime suspect, but once again he's someone else's patsy. Discovering whose exposes a Cain and Abel relationship; an ex-wife who was unwittingly sterilized; a philandering husband; a distraught and all-powerful patriarch; and several children, all fathered by the destructively charming Nick. Meanwhile, Charlie's pregnant sister-in-law Elizabeth dies of a uterine hemorrhage, her little niece almost dies by swallowing pills she found in auntie's coat pocket, and her husband Simon hates his newly delivered son and hires Marty--Charlie's (unrequited) love--to nanny him. The deaths peel away defenses, reveal past relationships that were semi-secret until now, and Charlie finds two clues: a check Elizabeth endorsed for Nick for $5000 and love letters from her to him. Charlie, for once, is off the hook--and the murderer is cornered. Written in that deceptively simple Mary Higgins Clark style, but meatier. The mystery plays second fiddle to the intertwined relationships but, still, this is effective and emotionally lacerating. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
