"Personal Effects"

J.C. Hutchins is an award-winning novelist best known for his 7th Son technothriller trilogy, which he released as free serialized audiobooks from 2006-07. With approximately 100,000 downloads of his episodic fiction still occurring each month, 7th Son is the most popular “podcast novel” series in history.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to Personal Effects: Dark Art, his debut in a new supernatural thriller series, and reported the following:

In one key way, page 69 of Personal Effects: Dark Art is very representative of the novel -- it features a nearly full-page watercolor illustration, one of dozens featured throughout the book. What little copy accompanies the illustration focuses on the family life of the book's protagonist, Zach Taylor.

But page 69 [at left, click to enlarge] is a relatively calm moment in the spooky stuff that unfolds in the supernatural thriller. Zach is an artist (the illustration on page 69 was painted by him), and an art therapist at Brinkvale Psychiatric Hospital, a hopeless mental institution with a bloody history. He's an optimistic dude, and very gifted at gleaning meaning behind his patients' artwork and therapy sessions ... until he meets his latest patient, Martin Grace.

Grace is a suspected serial killer, is psychosomatically blind, and doesn't want to be treated. In fact, he says a demonic entity called The Dark Man is responsible for the murders he's accused of committing. As the story progresses, Zach uses Grace's personal effects -- the items that were cataloged during Grace's processing into Brinkvale -- to sidestep his patient's belligerence and learn more about his past. In the process, he discovers some terrifying secrets about Martin Grace, excavates a government cover-up ... and learns that The Dark Man may be real, and may now be hunting the Zach himself.

In a groundbreaking twist, those "personal effects" that Zach collects actually come with the book. Photos, IDs, business cards, legal documents, artwork ... every item that Zach discovers during the course of the novel comes in a pocket on the book's inside cover. Combining clues in the book's text with clues found in those tangible, absolutely authentic-looking personal effects, readers are sent into a story-enhancing narrative that unfolds via phone messages and websites. The coolest part: this narrative information is stuff our hero Zach may never discover himself, making the reader not only an active participant in the story, but wiser than the book's protagonist. It's pretty spiffy stuff; Publishers Weekly recently gave it a starred review.

So, while page 69 of Personal Effects: Dark Art certainly evokes some of the creativity of the book's hero, I'd recommend flipping a few pages earlier -- and certainly later -- into the story for the real thrills and chills...

Watch the Personal Effects: Dark Art book trailer series and learn more about the book at the official website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Commencement"

J. Courtney Sullivan is a Brooklyn-based writer whose work has appeared in the New York Times, New York magazine, Elle, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, Allure, In Style, Men’s Vogue, the New York Observer, Tango, and in the essay anthology The Secret Currency of Love (Morrow.) She contributes to the website someecards.com, and is co-editing an anthology about young women and feminism with Courtney E. Martin. She serves on the advisory board of Girls Write Now, is a graduate of Smith College, and works in the editorial department of the New York Times.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to Commencement, her first novel, and reported the following:

Commencement is a novel about four very different friends—Celia, Bree, Sally and April—who meet as dormmates at Smith College and remain close years later, even as they follow divergent paths into adulthood.

Bree is a southern belle who arrives on campus engaged to her high school sweetheart. Her life takes an unexpected turn when she falls in love with a woman. There’s a popular acronym at Smith, SLUG, which stands for Smith Lesbian Until Graduation. At first, Bree believes the term applies to her, and that she will end the relationship once she leaves school. But it lasts long past graduation, a complicated and sometimes heartbreaking fact for Bree, whose conservative family can’t quite get their heads around the idea.

Bree and her girlfriend Lara meet while working at the campus bookstore. They are instantly drawn to one another. An early draft of the book contained a scene where the two of them sat on a bed together, flirting with the possibility of becoming more than just friends. What came next was more or less left up to the imagination. My best friend read the draft and said, “This is the least hot lesbian sex scene of all time. You need to spice it up.”

The revised version of that scene is the first thing that many readers mention to me now, and it begins—where else?—on page 69:

One Friday night, they were in Lara’s dorm room talking, sitting on the bed with Alison Krauss singing in the background. Lara leaned over and kissed Bree’s neck gently, moving her lips over Bree’s jawbone and onto her face, up to her lips.

“Is this okay?” Lara whispered.

Bree couldn’t say anything but yes.

As they kissed, Lara moved her hands under Bree’s dress and over her skin, making her tremble. “Take it off please,” Lara said.

Nervous and exhilarated, Bree slid the dress over her head and let Lara unhook her bra. She didn’t know what she was doing. It seemed that this should be easier, more intuitive than fooling around with a guy. After all, Lara’s body was so much like her own…

It gets hotter on page 70, trust me.

Is the passage indicative of the book as a whole? Not exactly, though there are a few other bodice-ripping sections that follow. But Commencement is a book about the choices—romantic, professional, political and personal—that shape us. And Bree’s choice to follow her heart is a bold one, which sets her on a path she never could have imagined.

Read an excerpt from Commencement, and learn more about the book and author at J. Courtney Sullivan's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Everyone She Loved"

Sheila Curran is the author of Diana Lively is Falling Down.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new novel, Everyone She Loved, and reported the following:

On page 69 of Everyone She Loved, a father is driving his two daughters home from school. It’s an ordinary scene in every way. The conversation bears the typical markers of normal family interaction: sibling rivalry, teenage angst, parental peacemaking. Readers opening here might think the father’s left his big boy pants at home. Why is he letting the teenager speak to him with such apparent disrespect?

Even when he gets to the point of reprimanding her, it’s so mild. What’s going on here?

“Listen, Dad?” Tessa asked, when they’d reached the front door. Suddenly she was filled with an urgent flash of panic, a need to keep her father and sister right where they were. “Can’t you just stay in town? June’s only gonna make a fool of herself at competition anyhow.”

Joey’s “Tessa!” had a strangled sound to it. June was still in the car, well out of earshot, but Tessa’s comment was still unacceptable. He shook his head. “Siobhan says she’s got a lot of talent.”

Tessa dropped her backpack in the front hall before turning back quietly to her father. She shook her head at him. “Dad, she is playing you.”

“She’s ten years old, Tessa.”

“Not June, Dad. Think! Like Mom used to say, whose bread’s getting buttered in this transaction?”

“I don’t want to hear another word—“ Joey whispered, fiercely protective of June’s confidence. He looked up to see Lucy trotting down the stairs, wiping her hands on the tail of her work shirt.

The numbers 6 and 9 are identical shapes, they are also opposites, upside down. And Tessa’s world, like that of every other person in this page, has had her life pulled out from under her. Nothing is as it seems.

Tessa – at first glance – is gorgeous, but she is also way too thin. She may seem critical of her sister, but the truth is that Tessa’s the protective one, seeking to spare June from being made fun of for being overweight at a dance competition where most of her peers will be slim and trim.

Both girls have used food as a means of coping with the grief of losing their mother nearly two years before. At this juncture, their father – still in mourning as well – is too aware of his daughters’ fragility to respond with anything but sympathy.

Another set of opposites mentioned in this page are also not whom they seem. Lucy – a voluptuous painter -- is Joey’s late wife’s best friend. She’s been helping raise the girls since their mother’s death. Lucy – who’s known the girls forever- is as unsettled and tentative as Joey, having lost her friend and watched the children she loves as her own suffer so deeply. On the other hand, Siobhan, the newcomer who Tessa believes is “playing” her father is a fitness expert trained in the treatment of eating disorders. She is brimming with the sort of certainty and simplistic answers that can only be found in a rather young, rather inexperienced person who’s never undergone the sudden shocking loss of someone she’s loved.

Our title, Everyone She Loved refers to the community who were most devastated by Penelope’s death: Joey. Her widower, the girls’ mother, and four of her dearest friends, each of whom must discover how to make things right, even when everything has been turned upside down.

And so this is a book, at heart, about switched identities, about making judgments before you’ve had the life experience to know that nothing is as simple as it looks, and finally, it’s about how even when we get turned upside down and don’t recognize what’s left of us, there’s a friend out there, at least one, who can recognize us for what we are, and help us find our way home again.

Read an excerpt from Everyone She Loved, and learn more about the book and author at Sheila Curran's website, blog, and Facebook page.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bought"

Anna David, author of the debut novel Party Girl, has written for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Playboy, Details, and many other publications. She is the sex-and-relationship expert on G4's Attack of the Show and is a regular guest on Fox News's Red Eye.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new novel, Bought, and reported the following:

I have to admit that putting Bought to the Page 69 Test was a bit unnerving at first, because the page happened to fall on one of those scenes that I rewrote endlessly in an attempt to make it work and I still wasn’t that happy with in the end. It focuses on the protagonist, Emma (a journalist temporarily posing as a kept-woman-in-training) being schooled by a professional kept woman on how to take the expensive handbags male clients provide and return them at Bloomingdale’s.

And then I got to the last sentence of the page, where Emma stares “at the pile of bags, not quite able to ask Amanda why converting goods into cash is any different than simply accepting money in the first place.” And I thought, Ah, ha! That actually is representative of exactly what the book is about.

While Bought, on the surface, is a glitzy tale of Hollywood excess which asks unpleasant questions about how all women use their sexuality to get what they want, the underlying theme for me has always been about the difference between who we are and who we look like we are, and the little lies we tell ourselves in order to construct those false images.

The “prostitutes” in the book get quote marks around their profession because they don’t consider themselves prostitutes: they sleep with men in exchange for gifts or to have expenses covered and because cash never (or rarely) crosses their hands, they staunchly insist that what they’re doing is wholly different from the activities of the “whores” they so deride.

But it’s the notion of the image we construct of ourselves that’s most fascinating to me. The main prostitute Bought focuses on is Jessica, a worldly, well-educated, cultivated, impossibly put-together, and controlling diva who looks like she’s got everything – and everyone – under her control but who’s actually teetering on the edge of emotional, spiritual and literal collapse with every breath she takes.

After living in Hollywood for so long – and spending many of those years interviewing celebrities – I became more and more interested in the false selves people craft and manipulate and how easy it is to get others to buy into and believe them. And celebrities certainly aren’t the only ones doing this: I know that it’s when I’m feeling the most insecure that I’ll often act the most brazen, and when I look like I most have it together professionally is often when I’m the least centered because I’ve been focusing all my energy on my external self.

Emma’s thought – that, essentially, returning expensive bags at Bloomingdale’s is the same damn thing as just taking money in the first place – is the first time she notices one of these girls lying to herself in order to justify her actions, and then using that lie to build a false image. And Emma’s journey in the book is really about discovering just how many of these lies she’s bought into her whole life. Page 69 is actually – rather amazingly -- the beginning of her ultimate conclusion.

Read the first chapter of Bought, and learn more about the book and author at Anna David's website and blog, and at the Bought website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Heroic Measures"

Jill Ciment is a professor of English at the University of Florida. Her books include the novels, Teeth of the Dog and The Law of Falling Bodies; a collection of short stories, Small Claims; and a memoir, Half a Life.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new novel, Heroic Measures, and reported the following:

On page 69, we find Alex and Ruth, the seventy-something hero and heroine of Heroic Measures, enduring the last few minutes of an open house. They’ve just put their apartment of forty-five years on the market. As a microcosm of the narrative, it’s not a bad example.

The page opens with a question. Alex asks two potential buyers in matching red parkas if the police have apprehended Pamir, the missing driver of a tanker truck that is “stuck” in the Midtown Tunnel. New Yorkers are panicked it’s the next terrorist attack.

The buyer, who hasn’t taken off his hood, shakes his head no.

“We have a million-dollar decision to make,” the other hood answers. “Turn off the goddam news.”

Alex and Ruth then slip back into their bedroom to phone the animal hospital. Their dachshund, Dorothy, seventy-something in dog years, has just undergone back surgery. The night before, Alex and Ruth had found her paralyzed on the kitchen floor. The entire open house has been spent waiting to find out if Dorothy will survive the surgery, let alone walk again.

One of the novel’s intents is to constantly juxtapose Dorothy’s plight with the city’s terror. The initial idea for the novel occurred to me shortly after 9/11.

Lost dog and cat flyers invariably catch my attention, and I make a special effort to look out for those missing pets. I remember one such flyer--a lost gray cat--adhered to a lamppost in my old neighborhood, the East Village. The next day the towers fell and in the aftermath, flyers for missing persons--photographs, which tower, what floor--began to share the lamppost. At first, nobody covered the lost cat poster, but eventually it was plastered over: the human tragedy consumed the animal's plight. If a novel can be reduced to a single image of conception, then the lost cat poster is responsible for Heroic Measures.

Page 69 ends with another potential buyer interrupting the private, heartbreaking moment Alex and Ruth share when they learn Dorothy hasn’t yet awoken from a seizure. The buyer, oblivious of circumstances, asks a most trivial, but practical question—their stove is missing a knob and he wants to know if he buys the apartment, where can he get one.

Read an excerpt from Heroic Measures, and learn more about the book and author at Jill Ciment's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Ménage"

Ewan Morrison is the author of the novels Distance, Swung, and Ménage as well as the collection of short stories The Last Book You Read. He also writes a weekly column for Scotland on Sunday under the name Weegie Bored.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to Ménage and reported the following:

Page sixty nine of Ménage seems, at first, totally atypical in that it barely contains mention of the protagonists – since the book is about a ménage a trios and so has three main characters this seems very strange indeed.

However, page sixty nine is a big symbolic pivot, one that propels the three rather innocent young friends: Dot, Saul and Owen, into a world of transgression from which they will emerge lovers in a ménage a trios who ultimately abuse and exploit each other.

It is 1992, Hoxton, London - the centre of the Young British Art Scene (Damien Hirst, et al). And Dot, Owen and Saul are struggling to be artists but - they need a catalyst.

On page sixty nine they are embarking on their quest to ‘turn their lives into a work of Art.’ They set out to pay a visit to Edna -‘The exemplary living artwork’. She is an enigma, they think her ‘seer-like’, ‘like an oracle’; she has gone to the very limit of the known world in drug induced hallucination. In her ‘dreadlocks with ribbons, Kaftans, Kimonos and Jesus Sandals’ it is as if she were ‘Some kind of hybrid Hindu Swami meets Rastafarian bong Queen, meets … Hare Krishna.’

Saul dresses androgynously to meet his guru with ‘Chanel Scarf round and his waist and two beauty spots.’ There is much laughter and nervous excitement among the three.

But Edna they will discover by the end of the book is no seer. Edna is not even a woman, but a very confused and damaged older man with fake breasts, a fake history and a drug addiction that’s forced him into dealing narcotics.

Saul, Dot and Owen set out, all three ‘bouncing along, arms interlocked’ unaware that Edna symbolises not the peak of artistic success but a downward spiral that awaits all who accept the Faustian pact of turning ones life into a work of art.

Such is the portentous innocence of page 69.

Learn more about the book and author at Ewan Morrison's website.

Read Morrison's essay "Death of a Nihilst or Obituary for a Nobody," which reveals the background for Ménage.

Ménage has been released only in the U.K. to date, yet it is available to readers around the globe via Amazon.co.uk.

Read Morrison's top ten list of literary ménages à trois.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bury Me Deep"

Megan Abbott is the author of the novels Die a Little, The Song Is You, and the 2008 Edgar winner, Queenpin.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new novel, Bury Me Deep, and reported the following:

For as long as I can remember, I’ve heard of Winnie Ruth Judd, the so-called “Velvet Tigress,” accused of murdering her two female friends in 1931 Phoenix. I’d always thought of it as one of those tawdry 1930s tabloid tales James M. Cain (Double Indemnity) would pluck from the headlines for his novels. But the more I read about the case, the more complex it seemed. Was it a case of cold-blooded murder, Winnie Ruth driven by jealous rage? Or was it, as she claimed, self-defense, a spat among friends turned violent? Or were those rumors of a frameup true? Winnie Ruth Judd became, for me, not a murderess but a lonely woman, deserted by her husband in the depths of the Depression, and quite possibly innocent of the crimes.

Bury Me Deep is my fictionalized telling of the case. Winnie Ruth becomes Marion Seeley, an abandoned wife who finds herself drawn to two of the town’s exuberant party girls, Louise and Ginny, and their dashing benefactor, Gentleman Joe Lanigan.

Page 69 is actually both an oddity in the book and, somehow, its truest page. The book is split up into sections, each one beginning with an introduction of sorts, a retrospective take on the events from an outsider’s viewpoint. While the rest of the book is seen through Marion’s fevered eyes, these opening sections remove us from Marion and give us a distance. They also tell us a lot about the heavy judgments laid against her by the “upright town’s folks.” Page 69 is the damning voice of Ina Curtwin, one of Marion’s coworkers, condemning Marion and her wayward friends:

“I told Mrs. Seeley to keep her distance from those two. But Marion, she liked their lively ways.

“Everyone knew about Louise, like what happened at the Dempsey Hotel. How someone called the law because there was a ruckus and there she was in the fifth-floor corridor going on two o’clock in the morning, only one shoe on and they brought her in and they let her go because some calls were made. She had friends. The right kinds, it seems. And all her friends have wives.

“And that Mr. Lanigan. He’s one of those. All those big fellas strutting around with fancy waistcoasts and running the town. Well, he’s an Elk. A Grand Knight with the Knights of Columbus. He sits on the Chamber of Commerce, handing out favors. If he weren’t a papist, he might be mayor.

“All those comers, every June they send their wives eighty miles straight up into the mountains. the Hassaymapa Mountain Club, they call it. Then, back here in town, they make hay all summer long. The office girls. Girls that work at the shops. And the nurses. Always the nurses. And there was talk of Marion being Mr. Lanigan’s summer gal, only it was still spring. I didn’t talk of it, but others did.”

“See, I walk in the Lord’s path of kindness and I figure I’ll tell Marion that there’s buzzing in the air and she might do best to keep her quarter, to walk in churchly ways. After all, she is a married woman and, the way it sounds, those girls are running a regular operation there. Wild parties and who knows what. Those girls have no starch in their pleats, do you know what I mean to say? When Louise Mercer walks, there’s nothing that stays still. And the other one, one hears tell, she haint stood upright since Hoover took oath and sunk us all.

“But Marion, she don’t care to listen. Like I said, she liked their lively ways.”

In many ways, this is the whole of the book—everything that will lead to a terrible crime. The clanging verdict on these women, and the threat they represent. And, most of all, Marion’s secret desire to be a part of that exciting world Louise and Ginny promise. She can’t stop herself.

Read an excerpt from Bury Me Deep, and learn more about the book and author at Megan Abbott's website.

At The Rap Sheet: The Story Behind the Story: “Bury Me Deep,” by Megan Abbott.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Memory Collector"

Meg Gardiner's Evan Delaney thrillers feature a smart-aleck freelance journalist, deal with religious extremism, a high school reunion killer, and sex, drugs, and rock’n'roll. Stephen King calls them “simply put, the finest crime-suspense series I’ve come across in the last twenty years,” and China Lake won the Edgar award for Best Paperback Original of 2008.

Her Jo Beckett series, featuring a San Francisco forensic psychiatrist, debuted in 2008 with The Dirty Secrets Club. The novel was chosen one of the year’s top ten thrillers by Amazon.com, and won the Romantic Times Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Procedural Novel of the year.

Gardiner applied the “Page 69 Test” to The Memory Collector, the second Jo Beckett novel, and reported the following:

In The Memory Collector, forensic psychiatrist Jo Beckett hits the ground running. And she has to sprint to keep up, because she’s out of her professional comfort zone.

Normally Jo performs psychological autopsies for the San Francisco police, to determine whether a victim’s death was natural, accident, suicide, or murder. But in this book she has a live patient. Ian Kanan has arrived home from a trip to Africa suffering from anterograde amnesia. He cannot form new memories. Every few minutes he forgets where he is and what has just happened. Jo must find out what has caused his devastating condition.

When Kanan disappears from the hospital, Jo’s job becomes critical. Kanan is a former mercenary. He may be seeking revenge against those responsible for his amnesia. Worse, people who were on his flight into San Francisco begin to show the same symptoms. Jo must track Kanan down and find out what is destroying his short-term memory before disaster strikes.

The book runs at high speed. And page 69 finds Jo enjoying a rare chance to catch her breath. She’s committed to her job, a thorough professional, sharp and empathic. But she’s not obsessed. She has a life, and a sense of humor, and a new man.

Page 69 gives readers a sense of all that.

The day outside had turned from gloomy to Hell, yeah.

Her house peered out across rooftops from the top of the hill, past the slick green of the magnolia in her back yard, over Victorian apartment buildings and houses painted Matchbox car colors. Beyond a neighbor’s Monterey pine, past neighborhoods that rode the hills and valleys like homes on a rolling sea, past the dark forests of the Presidio, was the Golden Gate Bridge, pulsing red in the stormy afternoon light. She twisted her hair up into a swirl and captured it in a claw clip.


She was halfway down the stairs when the doorbell rang. Her heart gave a kick. Probably FedEx, or Wendell the mailman on an amphetamine bender, doing his rounds five times faster than his colleagues. And five times worse. Probably delivering the wrong mail to everybody on the hill again.

But if it wasn’t Wired Wendell, the possibilities distilled to Oh, crap and Should have put on lipstick. Jo crossed the front hall and opened the door.

Gabriel Quintana stood on the porch. He was holding a sack of doughnuts and two cups of coffee large enough to power a top fuel dragster.

“Can I corrupt your day?” he said.

She smiled.

Taking the doughnuts, she let him in. “Bring me sugar, butter, and caffeine, and you can take my soul.” They walked down the hall to the kitchen. She looked in the sack. “Oh, yeah. What do you want me to do? Name it. Rob a bank? Toss one of those chocolate puppies on the counter and point me at a teller.”

“That’s not what I want.”

He set the coffee cups on the counter. He wrapped an arm around her waist, pulled her against him, and kissed her.

She didn’t need lipstick after all.

In the story, Jo barely gets any time alone with Gabe. By page 70, their moment is interrupted. Jo spends the rest of the novel trying, with comic frustration, to get her new boyfriend by himself.

It’s one of the things that I enjoyed most about writing the book.

Read an excerpt from The Memory Collector, and learn more about the book and author at Meg Gardiner's website and blog.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dismantled"

Jennifer McMahon is the New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Island of Lost Girls and Promise Not to Tell.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new novel Dismantled, and reported the following:

Dismantled tells the story of the Compassionate Dismantlers, a group of college students who band together to form an outlaw art group based on the belief that true art is about taking things apart, not putting them together. The group disintegrates when their leader, Suz, dies and the others decide to cover it up. Ten years later, two of the members, Henry and Tess, are living with their nine-year-old daughter an hour’s drive from the cabin where the Dismantlers spent their final summer. Although they’re trying to keep up the pretense of normalcy, their marriage is falling apart.

When other former Dismantlers receive mysterious postcards bearing Dismantler slogans, a series of tragic events is triggered. It seems as if someone, or something, is determined to dredge up the past Henry and Tess have struggled so hard to put behind them.

On page 69, we find the modern day Henry struggling to begin a sculpture (something he hasn’t attempted since his college days as a Dismantler).

The wood guides the sculpture.

The wood alone knows what it wants to become.

These were the things he believed back in college, this naïve notion of ethereal messages that it was up to him to pick up on, to spell out with his mallet and chisels.

‘Sometimes I think we’re just conduits,’ Tess told him once, years ago, when she sat in his studio space in the corner of the sculpture building at Sexton. ‘Like the art that we make can’t possibly come from us. Do you know what I mean?’

She was sitting cross-legged on the floor, cradling a mug of coffee in both hands. A small-framed, compact girl who hardy took up any space at all, yet she’d say these things with such fierce intensity in her eyes that they came out like the words of a giant.

Henry nodded. Yes. He felt that way all the time. He was just a pair of hands – someone, something, else was doing the real work.

Dismantled is a complex book – it’s told from multiple points of view, there are characters masquerading as other characters, an imaginary friend who seems to have an agenda all her own. It’s full of twists and turns and deception, none of which are evident on page 69.

Dismantled is also about a broken family and the ways they are each trying to understand the past in order to live in the present. Page 69 is representative of the book in that it gets inside Henry’s head, and takes us from the present day storyline back into the past. It gives us a glimpse of Tess and Henry as idealistic young artists, and shows the older Henry feeling lost and inept. One of the challenges for these characters is facing the ghosts of their past selves – which is almost more frightening than facing the real ghost they come to believe may be haunting them.

Read an excerpt from Dismantled, and learn more about the book and author at Jennifer McMahon's website and MySpace page.

Watch the Dismantled video trailer.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Missing Ink"

Karen E. Olson, author of the Annie Seymour mystery series, applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new novel, The Missing Ink, and reported the following:

In the first tattoo shop mystery, The Missing Ink, tattooist Brett Kavanaugh is drawn into a missing persons case when a potential client disappears. The last place she was seen was at Brett’s shop, commissioning a devotion tattoo with the name of her fiancé in a heart.

I had no idea what Page 69 would tell me, but when I flipped to it, I realized that it does give a clear picture of Brett’s personality, as well as Bitsy’s, her shop manager. It’s also pivotal in illustrating the surprise when it’s discovered that the name the client wanted on the tattoo was not the name of her fiancé, thus, pulling the reader into the story even further.

But Bitsy wasn’t the only one getting screwed.

Chip Manning was, too.

Because the camera zoomed in on my sketch. Complete with the “Matthew” inside the heart.

Alison Cho didn’t notice. She put the piece of paper in her lap and thanked me for my time.

It was over.

I stood up, trying to yank the mike and wire off my person and was happy to see the producer come over to me. I assumed he’d help me out, but his mouth was set in a grim line.

“That drawing. It was the wrong one.”

Alison’s head snapped back. “What?”

“It was the wrong drawing.” He looked at Bitsy, who’d come up next to me.

“Why didn’t you give me the right one? Was it because we didn’t put you on camera?”

So Bitsy’s attitude had not gone unnoticed.

From the look on her face, I could see she was going to say something she’d probably regret, so I jumped in. “It was the right one.”

His gaze moved from Bitsy to me. “But it said Matthew. Not Chip, or even Bruce.”

“That’s right.” I met his stare.

“You mean she wanted a tattoo with another man’s name on it?”

Read an excerpt from The Missing Ink, and learn more about the author and her work at Karen E. Olson's website and blog.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Zadayi Red"

Caleb Fox has lived in many worlds. Raised in Cherokee country, he received a scholarship from Columbia University and moved to New York. Later he moved to Los Angeles where he wrote for newspapers, magazines and movies. Raised white and Christian, Fox was intrigued on a visit home to discover that his family was half Cherokee. He began to explore the great myths of Indian cultures.

His novel Zadayi Red is a fantasy set in prehistoric America. After the last page turned, he caught one of the characters for a quick interview.

“Su-Li? Su-Li? Would you give us a few words?”

The buzzard turns his head and studies you and me. In my mind, and yours, he says, Okay, you’re the writer guy. Su-Li sounds incredibly weary. Who’s this?

“A reader interested in our novel Zadayi Red. I know, you’re about to go back to the land where the Immortals live, but may we just ask a couple of questions?”

I’m worn out with mortals, says Su-Li.

You whisper, “How does he talk without sounds?”

“Magic,” I whisper back. “Spirit power.”

You look at me impatiently. Su-Li does the same, but harder.

I speak to the buzzard quickly, before we lose him. “Su-Li, tell us what you did on earth.”

I was the spirit guide of a medicine woman.

“Did you like being on earth?”

Living around death... His voice is full of sorrow.

“Tell us something about your life here.”

“I want to go home. Why don’t you show him? Let him read, uh, uh, page sixty-nine.”

I don’t like it.

Hey, it’s just like he cracks the book in a store.

“Okay,” I say, “give him a little more help. Let him see it, like a movie.”

Su-Li nods.

MOVIE, WITH A CRAWL:

When people got a got look at the intruders, they dropped their jaws. Tsola was blindfolded, steadied on one side with a hand on the back of a black panther. On the other side Sunoya bore a buzzard on her shoulder and held Tsola’s arm.

“That’s Su-Li on the young woman’s shoulder?”

“Sure.”

“Spirit guide. I don’t believe this.”

“You’re seeing it.”

Courtesy swerved like a drunk. A child cried. People actually spoke aloud. Some of the twelve chiefs half rose—not a single Peace Chief or War Chief had ever seen the Wounded Healer. Every head craned toward the slight figure of the tribe’s Seer.

Sunoya didn’t know which was bigger, astonishment at the unprecedented appearance of the most powerful chief of the nation, or fear of the black cat.

“The old woman is holding that panther?”

“No, he’s like a seeing eye dog. He also guards her. He shifts shape at will from human to panther.”

“Who gets a guard like that?”

“The Wounded Healer, the Medicine Chief of the entire tribe.”

“Why is she blind-folded?”

“She lives so far in the Cavern that her eyes can’t take light any more.”

As we watch, the old woman sits by the sacred fire and begins to unwrap the hide bundle she carries.

“I have to stop the movie, sorry. You’re not supposed to see the contents of the bundle.”

“What’s in it?”

“The most terrible news the tribe has ever had. Su-Li, explain…”

As I speak, the Immortal Buzzard winks once and dematerializes.

“How’d he do that?” you say. “Where’d he go?”

“Home. To the Land beyond the Sky Arch, where the Immortals live.”

“I’d like to go there.”

“If you read Zadayi Red, you will.”

Read an excerpt from Zadayi Red, and learn more about the book and author at Caleb Fox's website and blog.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Everything Matters!"

Ron Currie, Jr.'s first book, God is Dead, won the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library and the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to Everything Matters!, his debut novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 of my novel Everything Matters! is representative of the whole of the book in that it details the first meeting of the two characters whose love serves as one of the story’s centerpieces. The protagonist, Junior Thibodeau, is in gifted and talented class on the day of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and like kids all over the country, he and his classmates are watching the launch live on closed-circuit television. But Junior can’t concentrate on the launch, because a girl named Amy has just been introduced as a transfer from the Catholic school across town, and Junior is instantly smitten. Amy sits next to him, and as the lights are dimmed Junior is ostensibly watching the television, but in actuality he can’t take any of his other senses off of Amy—he smells the fabric softener on her clothes, hears the whisper of her breath, even feels the heat from her body. Then, of course, his attention is wrenched away from Amy when the shuttle explodes, and as he watches in horror he feels Amy’s hand on his, and this is the manner in which their love is first consummated:

“You feel Amy’s palm slide down the back of your hand, and when her fingers interlace with yours and squeeze, you squeeze back. It is not nearly the thrill that it should be. It is bare comfort. And then, as the first pieces of the Challenger hit the water off Cape Canaveral, the PAO finally comes back on. Reluctantly, as though he’s being prodded with the point of a blade, he utters what may be one of the biggest understatements of the twentieth century: ‘Obviously,’ he says, ‘a major malfunction.’”

It’s a bad portent for Junior and Amy, who despite the fact that they love one another deeply are up against some pretty serious forces, both earthly and cosmic, that conspire to keep them apart. And these forces succeed, for a while and in a manner. After graduating from high school Amy gives Junior the boot and moves to California, while Junior takes up drinking in Chicago. Years pass, and through a series of circumstances the two find themselves together again, then again separated in a manner that seems final. Through a twist of plot, though, they get an unlikely third chance, and the outcome of Junior’s life more or less hinges on what he does with it.

Read an excerpt from Everything Matters!, and learn more about the book and author at Ron Currie, Jr.'s website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue