title: Love Among the Ruins: A Novel
author:  Robert Clark 
description: Edgar Award-winner Clark (Mr. White's Confession) abandons the psychological murder mystery genre of his earlier work to plumb the emotional depths and dangers of young love and mature infidelity in this literary fiction set in 1968 Minnesota. Clark rambles through the hearts and minds of Bill Lowry, 17, and Emily Byrne, 16, in wordy, reflective fashion, treating teenage passion with serious intensity. Bill's divorced, politically active mother, Jane, is a delegate to the Democratic convention in Chicago. The riots there and Humphrey's selection as the Democratic candidate find her disenchanted with the system and skeptical about the chances for an early end to U.S. participation in the Vietnam war. Bill will be graduating from high school next year and the specter of the draft hangs over him as he begins his romance with Emily by letter. Emily's parents, Edward and Virginia, are a loving, Catholic, middle-class couple whose comfortable marriage contains neither pain nor passion. As Emily and Bill's romance progresses from letters to coffeehouse dates to surprisingly mature sex, Clark effectively evokes the youthful yearnings for freedom and a return to nature that characterized the '60s. Swept away by their love, Bill convinces Emily that their only chance to remain together is to run away to the north woods of Minnesota and live off the land. When the two teenagers disappear, their parents react to the stress in decidedly different ways. Readers will be drawn in by Clark's languid rhythms and his careful period detail, and the novel's tragic conclusion will serve baby boomers as a bittersweet reminder of a time when the nation was jerked painfully from adolescence into adulthood.
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  More Praise for Picnic in the Ruins
  
  “In this twenty-first-century fusion of Zane Grey, Tony Hillerman, and Craig
  Childs, Todd Robert Petersen gives us a page-turner of a murder mystery that
  tackles the ethics of archaeology. Along the way, he dispels a raft of
  traditional ‘exquisite misapprehensions’ about the American West.”
  
  —STEPHEN TRIMBLE, editor of Red Rock Stories: Three Generations of Writers
  Speak on Behalf of Utah’s Public Lands
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ALSO BY TODD ROBERT PETERSEN
  
  It Needs to Look Like We Tried
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  ![](images/00001.jpg)
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  For my parents
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Picnic in the Ruins
  
  Copyright © 2021 by Todd Robert Petersen
  
  First edition: 2021
  
  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright
  Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner
  whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case
  of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
  
  This book is a work of fiction. Names, cha