Wed 6 Jan 2021
PAUL RUSE – The Alumni Murders. Tower, paperback original, 1980.
This is a page-turner. While obviously as exploitative as horror movies such as Prom Night, which just played here on network television, here is a book that in its own way, you may find equally difficult to let loose of.
And the story is very nearly the same. To revenge a hurt inflicted years in the past, someone is hunting down and killing those judged responsible. This time the story takes place at a high school reunion party, somewhere by a small lake in Kansas.
The killer is unknown, but once the deaths begin, easily spotted. What I found most remarkable was that the characters, while sometimes crudely and pulpishly drawn, were actually strong enough to command my attention all the long while before the first killing takes place, fully seventy percent of the way into the book.
Rating: C plus
January 6th, 2021 at 9:08 pm
Nothing is known about the author. This was his only book under this name.
The image you see with the clipped corner, is one of only two I could choose from online, and the other was badly distorted.
Clipping corners of paperbacks was a common technique used by paperback swap shops to indicate that they did not want this book to come back into the store.
Do you remember paperback swap shops? Most of the ones that existed in this area back in the 70s and 80s knew me very well.
January 7th, 2021 at 9:26 am
Ahhhhhhh yes! The Swap Shops! Now gone the way of the BLOCKBUSTERS,
January 7th, 2021 at 12:51 pm
The very nice swap shops in the suburbs of Detroit mainly made their living with romance novels. There would be huge romance sections, and much smaller mystery ones. Still, you often found very nice mystery books in them. I miss them!
January 7th, 2021 at 9:39 pm
I recall the swap shops too. Usually they had a decent Mystery and SF section, a ton of romance, a few general fiction, a room of discarded non fiction, and tons of broken spine Readers Digest and Detective Book Club Condensed Books, stacks and stacks of digests, and one small rack of Westerns because Western readers never let go of a book until they died or didn’t haunt swap shops.
The collegiate murder is a fairly old theme. THRTEEN WOMEN and THE LEAGUE OF FRIGHTENED MEN are both that general plot.