Killing Time in Buffalo: A Novel - Hardcover

Laiken, Deidre S.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0316512230 ISBN 13: 9780316512237

Publisher: Little Brown & Co, 1990

Synopsis

Renee and Fran--college students in the late 1960s--are eager to partake of the Bohemian pleasures and spirit of freedom all around them, until a strange intruder begins tormenting Renee

About this title

From Publishers Weekly

Edgar Allan Poe Award-winner Laiken ( Death Among Strangers ) is less successful with her new novel, set in Buffalo, N.Y., during the "love summer" of 1967 with its drug-induced frolicking. Renee and Fran, university students, have chosen to spend the summer in one of the run-down apartment buildings that face Days Park, a Haight-Ashbury for those who can't afford airfare to San Francisco. The two girls have swallowed whole the vague rhetoric of an escapist hippie generation to whom money is vulgar but shoplifting is a political act. Renee's husband, Barry, has been missing for a few weeks, a situation that intrigues Fran more than it does Renee herself. Their frequent use of drugs makes it even harder for Renee to sort out her fragmented past. Meanwhile, she believes that someone is trying to kill her. Pivotal is older brother Leon, who protected her as a child from their mother's madness but who can no longer save Renee from every mishap that overtakes her. The development of the brother-sister relationship is by far the strongest element of the book, but this paradigm is overworked. What suspense remains in the mysterious intrusions into Renee's apartment is overcome by an onslaught of coincidences at novel's end.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This novel by Laiken ( Death Among Strangers) is filled with hallucinatory paranoia and drug-induced anxiety. It takes place in Buffalo during 1967's "Summer of Love," where college student Renee Weiss is suffering from the aftereffects of being raised by a mentally ill mother. Renee's husband has disappeared, but he seems to keep returning to their apartment while she is gone. The plot is confused somewhat by the author's use of flashbacks in the narrative, but a fair amount of suspense is built up. The characters are mostly Sixties stereotypes, but the conclusion does bring a few real surprises. For larger popular fiction collections.
- Gwen Gregory, Adams State Coll. Lib., Alamosa, Col.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Little Brown & Co
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0316512230
• ISBN 13: 9780316512237
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 275