"Onion Street"

Reed Farrel Coleman's eighth and latest Moe Prager mystery is Onion Street.

Coleman applied the Page 69 Test to Onion Street and reported the following:

Page 69 of Onion Street is more representative of the tense tone of the novel than of the novel itself.

… He’d won the rabbit’s foot in Coney Island for shooting a red star out of a piece of paper with a BB submachine gun.

The twenty year old Moe Prager sits in his brother’s car, spying on his best friend, Bobby Freidman. As Moe watches, he notices Bobby pull out his key chain and on that chain is that rabbit’s foot. Bobby, whose parents are old school Communists, don’t much care for their son because he likes money. He likes making it and he likes spending it.

As Moe watches, he recalls joking with Bobby about how he’d won the rabbit’s foot.

… “Shooting a red star,” I said. “don’t tell your parents or they’ll send you to Siberia.”

I remember he just kind of laughed, but I think he kept the stupid rabbit’s foot as a kind of Fuck you to his parents...

But there’s nothing funny about what’s happening in pg 69 or in the previous 68 pages. Moe’s girlfriend Mindy, a campus radical, has been beaten into a coma and left to die on the streets of Brooklyn. As she fights for her life in the hospital, Moe is staking out an address which he has been led to believe is somehow connected to the attack on Mindy. Just as he is about to check out the address himself, Moe spots Bobby opening the door to that address. Moe’s head fills with questions. Why is Bobby there? Why does he have keys to the front door? Moe has no answers and does the only thing he can do.

… Bobby was stepping through the white door and closing it behind him. I fought my natural curiosity, sat tight, and waited. My patience was rewarded. Less than five minutes after he went in, Bobby came flying through the white door. His head was on a swivel, turning right, then left, then right again. He was breathless, panting, his chest heaving, but it was the panicked look on his face that really got my attention. Sucking in big gulps of frosty air, blowing staccato clouds of steam out of his mouth, he seemed to be trying to calm himself down before taking another step. Then, after he’d seen that no one was walking his way from either directions, Bobby rushed into his Olds and fishtailed away, smoking his rear tires on the slick pavement at he went.

What had Bobby seen in the apartment? Moe didn’t know, but he was about to find out.

Learn more about the book and author at Reed Farrel Coleman's website.

Writers Read: Reed Farrel Coleman.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Grail of the Summer Stars"

Freda Warrington, who was born in and lives in Leicestershire, England, is the author of twenty novels. The recently released Grail of the Summer Stars is her third Aetherial Tales novel, her first series to be published in the United States. The first, Elfland, was named Best Fantasy of the Year by RT Book Reviews.

Warrington applied the Page 69 Test to Grail of the Summer Stars and reported the following:

The ‘Page 69’ test is such fun – I’ve applied it before (to Elfland) and it worked out quite nicely, showing a pivotal scene in the protagonist’s life. Of course, every page should do this but it won’t always be the scene the author would have chosen to showcase! So I’m pleased to find that page 69 of Grail of the Summer Stars – my third Aetherial Tale for Tor – contains a crucial encounter for my character Rufus.

Rufus is an age-old Aetherial (a non-human, elf-like-but-not race who live in the contemporary world) from an ancient civilisation known as the Felynx, and he's a bit of a “baddie”. He loves bringing mischief and mayhem to those around him, with the odd bit of genocide thrown in. However, believing his brother Mistangamesh to be dead (see Midsummer Night), he’s embarked on a grief-stricken orgy of self-destruction which has led him to the depths of evil – illegal arms-trading. Somewhere in the wilds of the Pakistan/ Afghanistan border, he has lost his Jeep in an earthquake and found his way to the nearest town, where he meets a seismologist calling herself Dr Orla Connelly. Rufus strongly suspects Orla of being his long-lost sister Aurata, with whom he once had an incestuous relationship. After a long day spent digging survivors out of the rubble, they are resting in Orla’s tent, playing a game of “Who’s going to admit it first?”

The ground began to tremble with a prolonged aftershock.

“Now one of us should make a joke about the earth moving,” said Rufus.

“The earthquake is due to faulting within the lithosphere of the subducted Arabian Plate as it grinds beneath the convergent plate boundaries,” she murmured.

“I’m not sure that’s funny, but the way you say it sounds incredibly sexy.”

“Oh, it is.” She smiled, more with her eyes than her mouth.

They lay in silence, waiting for the movement to subside. Orla stared upward, as if absorbing every nuance. He still couldn’t believe that she’d become a scientist, a doctor, part of a team. That was true human camouflage. He’d never troubled to learn anything in particular, still less to attend a university or give any credence to human qualifications. She’d evolved, and he felt oddly inadequate. But, after all this time, who wouldn’t change? Even the ancient, timeless Felynx. The question was not whether they’d changed, but how much the changes actually mattered?

Now they were engaged in a strange dance around each other, both secretly knowing the truth but daring the other one to speak first.

“One of us should begin,” said Orla. “What are you thinking?”

Finally Rufus said, “I used to dream about you. You were calling to me from some kind of limbo with grey walls. Nine-tenths of me was sure you perished in Azantios, but the last tenth insisted that you must still exist . . . somewhere.”

He heard her release a small breath of exasperation. “Who do you think I am? Rufus, we both know, so why can’t we say it aloud?”

“It might break the magic,” he said softly.

Her eyes narrowed, irresistibly seductive. “Magic? Rufus, please. Is it gun-selling that’s turned you so romantic?”

“All right.” He paused. “It’s gentlemanly to go first, but I hesitate because I’ve made grave mistakes in the past. I was convinced I recognized someone, so convinced that I couldn’t accept I was monstrously wrong. Now I have the same feeling about you, but I don’t trust it.”

“This time, you probably should trust yourself, Rufus. I have been calling you. Gods, it took you long enough to hear me!”

“Calling . . .?” He stared into the deep fire of her eyes. “Tell me your real name. I’ve already told you mine.”

“No. You must say it; then I’ll tell you if you’re right.”

“This is turning into a game.”

“No game.” She trailed a finger from his shoulder to his elbow. Her voice was honey. “This is more important than you can imagine.”

Grinning, he leaned off the mattress and picked up her notebook and pen lying nearby. “All right, I’m going to write your true name on a piece of paper. Then you say it out loud, and we’ll see if it matches what I’ve written.”

While Rufus isn’t the main protagonist – that role is shared by a new character, Stevie, and the supposedly dead Mistangamesh – he is a definite antagonist, a major player crucial to the plot. Was Rufus responsible for attacking Stevie and stealing an enigmatic painting from her? And why has the artist – her old flame Daniel – gone missing? The story takes Stevie and Mist from an industrial museum in Birmingham (UK), to the village of Cloudcroft (where they seek help from characters we met in Elfland) and on a weird and terrifying journey through the Otherworld to the colourful deserts of Nevada, as they try to unravel a tangle of unearthly mysteries. Each Aetherial Tale can be read on its own, but it's nice if you read all three because there's a big background arc that resolves in Grail.

Learn more about the book and author at Freda Warrington's website, blog, and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: Elfland.

The Page 69 Test: Midsummer Night.

My Book, The Movie: Midsummer Night.

Writers Read: Freda Warrington.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Where the Light Falls"

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Katherine Keenum graduated from Vanderbilt University with a B.A. in English and earned a Ph.D. in medieval studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She worked in the publicity department of the New Orleans Public Schools, taught in the expository writing program at Yale University, and served as the executive editor of the book publishing program of the Council on East Asian Studies at Harvard University.

Keenum applied the Page 69 Test to Where the Light Falls, her first published work of fiction, and reported the following:

I laughed out loud when I opened Where the Light Falls after receiving the invitation to take the Page 69 Test. Right smack-dab in the middle of the page was a chapter break with lots of white space above and below it.

The next thing they knew, they had been disgorged into Paris.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Getting Started

For their first week, Jeanette and Effie had reservations at the Pavillon des Dames, a hotel on the Left Bank recommended by Miss Whitmore. As soon as their porter found their four-wheeled fiacre, Effie handed him his tip and read off their address to the driver: Her accent was bad, but her delivery had the ring of authority. In dealing with city cab drivers, she was back in her element.

Can’t we choose something more representative? I thought. Yet the more I looked, the more I realized that applying the Page 69 Test here points to two valuable lessons. First, although the tactile sensation of turning a new page may help emphasize the change from one chapter to the next in a printed book, it cannot do so if the page design calls for continuous flow nor can it ever do so in an e-book. For writers today, therefore, it is more important than ever to make sure narrative rhythm, continuity, and contrast between chapters are controlled by the prose. Second, in this case, the end of Chapter Six and beginning of Chapter Seven were places where I had condensed in response to an editorial call for shortening the overall manuscript. Out went enlivening dialogue and incident that contributed to atmosphere more than the plot. Lesson learned: In my current work-in-progress, I am resolved that by the time an editor sees the manuscript, it will contain no extended passages that anyone would think for a moment could come out!

Learn more about the book and author at Katherine Keenum's website and blog.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Katherine Keenum and Palmer.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Love Me Anyway"

Tiffany Hawk is writer living near Washington D.C. whose work has appeared in such places as The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, National Geographic Traveler and on NPR’s “All Things Considered.” Her debut novel, Love Me Anyway, is a darkly funny look into the emotional heart of the airline industry, with all its allure, loneliness, and ever-present temptations.

Hawk applied the Page 69 Test to Love Me Anyway and reported the following:

I was looking forward to this test, but I have to admit I also wondered how I would feel if it turned out to be a lame page. I couldn’t believe what I found – the one page that is simultaneously the most and least representative of the story. Page 69 opens the chapter called How to Be a Flight Attendant, the only chapter that is written in the second person. It’s meant to speak for all of the characters, and yet it isn’t from the perspective of a single one of them, though it does hint at Emily’s soon-to-ignite love affair.

How to be a Flight Attendant

There is only one way to survive life as a new flight attendant. Appear perfect. Luckily, this comes easy for you. You have been pleasing people all your life.

Arrive twenty minutes early for your four a.m. check-in. Carefully pin each strand of your hair into a wisp-free French twist. Buff your black high-heels on the Buffmaster electric shoe shiner in the pre-flight groom room. Cheerfully welcome three hundred and twelve passengers with a well-feigned enthusiasm for pre-dawn departures. Try not to let the guy in 14E remind you of the last man you kissed. With 26,000 flight attendants, the odds of running into him are slim.

Push the beverage cart down the aisle and pass out OJs and coffees and decafs.

Make sure to place the napkins face up with the airline’s logo pointed towards the passengers. You have to be careful. A girl was actually sent home from training for blowing this one.

Ask the man in 17H. “Can I get you something to drink this morning, sir?”

“I don’t know if you can, but you may get me a sparkling water with lime,” he says with a scowl.

It’s a short page, but I like that it encompasses so much of what the book is about – the day-in-the-life details of the airline world, the anonymity and loneliness of being on the road, the constant opportunities for fleeting intimacies, some of which prove impossible to forget.

Learn more about the book and author at Tiffany Hawk's website.

My Book, The Movie: Love Me Anyway.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Domestic Affairs"

Bridget Siegel, author of Domestic Affairs: A Campaign Novel, has worked on political campaigns at the local, state, and national levels. A graduate of Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service, she is now an actor, writer, and political consultant. She lives in New York City.

Siegel applied the Page 69 Test to Domestic Affairs and reported the following:

Page 69 starts with a young fundraiser spewing inside-baseball campaign speak to some heavy hitting donors and ends with “Olivia sat up a little, jolted by the touch of his (the Governor's) hand on her shoulder ...". While a reader might be more intrigued with a turn of the page, when the Governor's hand falls to a comfortable resting place on the small of the young fundraiser's back, I do think page 69 is pretty representative of the book on the whole. If I've done it right it's a behind-the-scenes look at political fundraising with a behind-the-behind-the-scenes affair.

Learn more about the book and author at Bridget Siegel's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: Domestic Affairs.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Criminal"

Terra Elan McVoy has been reading and writing since she first learned how to, and her whole life has been motivated by her enthusiasm for those two things. She received her BA in English at St. Andrews University, and an MA in Creative Writing from Florida State University. She has worked as an event coordinator at a major chain bookstore; an editorial assistant at an NYC publisher; as manager of an independent children's bookstore; and as Program Director of the AJC Decatur Book Festival. She is the author of Pure, After the Kiss, The Summer of Firsts and Lasts, Being Friends with Boys, and Criminal.

McVoy applied the Page 69 Test to Criminal and reported the following:

From Page 69:

I wanted Dee holding me again, like he had been only an hour ago. Making the world only him and me and nothing else.

“Go in there,” she gestured to the bathroom around the corner, “look in the mirror, and you tell me just how happy you are.”

“Maybe you should do that yourself,” I spat, turning around and leaving her there alone in her clean kitchen.

But when I went to wash my face and brush my teeth, no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t meet the eye of my reflection for more than a few seconds at a time.

Bird and I had fought before. Usually, after, we didn’t even apologize. She didn’t like dwelling on much of anything, but especially not ugliness. But apparently she’d been dwelling on her dislike for Dee even more than I thought. And now that it was out, I didn’t know how long it was going to stay around.

The next morning, I kept out of her way. I was still mad, too. She had to do her KFC job though, and I had to go to work myself, so that made avoiding her easier. When I got home we ate dinner at the TV and then went to bed, not talking more than we had to. I was calmer at that point, but it was clear she still needed space. I understood she was mad about the police, because they freaked me out too. But they hadn’t come around to ask me anything else today...

Surprisingly enough, this is a nice little microcosm of Criminal. It mentions Dee (Nikki’s boyfriend), and Bird (Nikki’s roommate/best friend), and also how much Bird dislikes Dee. It also mentions the police, and that Nikki isn’t feeling so great about what’s going on, so you get a touch of the crime element here too.

Bird and Nikki’s relationship is actually one of the most emotional parts of the book for me. Bird is the foil in Nikki’s life for Dee, but unfortunately, Nikki favors the destructive love she gets from her boyfriend, over the stronger, more difficult love of her best friend. The arc of this friendship —how Nikki betrays Bird, and what Bird does as a result— is one of the ways in which Criminal is not actually so different from my other books, though. As somebody who is blessed with amazing, long-term friends —with whom I’ve experienced a variety of ups and downs—I really enjoy writing about the bonds between friends, how and why they get broken, and how you make amends over time (if at all). I think if you look at all of my books, actually, that’s a consistent theme with me.

Learn more about the book and author at Terra Elan McVoy's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

My Book, The Movie: The Summer of Firsts and Lasts.

My Book, The Movie: Being Friends with Boys.

Writers Read: Terra Elan McVoy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Glass Wives"

Amy Sue Nathan lives and writes near Chicago where she hosts the popular blog, Women's Fiction Writers. She has published articles in Huffington Post, Chicago Tribune and New York Times Online among many others. Nathan is the proud mom of a son and a daughter in college, and a willing servant to two rambunctious rescued dogs.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Glass Wives, and reported the following:

What a shock to turn to page 69, which is the last page of Chapter 5, and find the crux of The Glass Wives within the few lines printed there.

Beth reached into her pocket and pulled out her smartphone. “Let’s make a list of everything you need.”

Evie knew what she needed, and Beth wouldn’t find her at the grocery store.

This is a turning point in the novel—the actual premise itself—when Evie, the main character, cautiously agrees to share her home, and living expenses, with her ex-husband’s young widow and baby. It’s this admission, acceptance—this resignation, if you will—that leads Evie on the path to altering her own perception of what it means to be a family.

And that’s what The Glass Wives is all about.

Learn more about the book and author at Amy Sue Nathan's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Amy Sue Nathan & Mitzi and Lizzie.

My Book, The Movie: The Glass Wives.

Writers Read: Amy Sue Nathan.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Where You Can Find Me"

Sheri Joseph is the author of the novels Where You Can Find Me (Thomas Dunne Books 2013) and Stray (MacAdam/Cage 2007), as well as a cycle of stories, Bear Me Safely Over (Grove/Atlantic 2002). She has received a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship and the Grub Street National Book Prize, among other awards. She lives in Atlanta and teaches in the creative writing program of Georgia State University.

Joseph applied the Page 69 Test to Where You Can Find Me and reported the following:

I’d actually looked at my book awhile back with “The Page 69 Test” in mind and was disappointed that it seemed to fall in a lull. Just a few pages before, or after, there was strangeness and drama. On page 67, Marlene Vincent is in the cloud forest of Costa Rica with her 14-year-old son, Caleb, newly recovered after a three-year disappearance; one minute she’s rapturous and the next gripped with an illogical rage, the feeling that this is a stranger and not her child. On page 72, we’re in Caleb’s head as he encounters what he believes to be the ghost of a girl he knew while he was missing. In comparison to either, Page 69 struck me as kind of blah: a visit to a wildlife center where Marlene’s mother-in-law, Hilda, has taken her family to show them a pair of jaguars she hopes to reintroduce into the wild.

So I was surprised when a writer friend who’d offered to interview me on stage at my first book event asked me to read from, of all pages, 69. At this point in the story, Marlene is fixedly observing Caleb as he interacts with a new friend his age, Isabel; meanwhile Stancia, who run the wildlife center, inquires after Hilda’s “missing son” (Marlene’s husband Jeff, left behind in the States). Stancia gives the group a tour of her makeshift wildlife hospital while explaining how some of the orphans came into her keeping:

“Critical age is very important,” Stancia was saying. “It is the time each animal learns what it is, if it is a coati or a motmot or a spectacled owl.” They had stopped at the cage of the owl, which blinked at them from a near branch and clacked its beak softly. “This one, he was kept by a farmer from when he was a baby, so he thinks he’s a person. He can’t unlearn that. Now he must live here always.”

So page 69, while quieter on the human drama, offers a useful glimpse of the novel’s central themes. Questions of critical age, in as much as they can be applied to human beings, have everything to do with this boy who was abducted at age 11 into a life with strangers, under traumatic and largely unknown circumstances. The key question for Caleb, and for the book, is one of identity: whether he can truly return to his family or whether he has been, like the owl or possibly the jaguars, too altered by his experience to safely fit.

Learn more about the book and author at Sheri Joseph's blog and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Slippage"

Ben Greenman is an editor at The New Yorker and the author of several acclaimed books of fiction, including Superbad, Superworse, and A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both: Stories About Human Love. His fiction, essays, and journalism have appeared in numerous publications, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Paris Review, Zoetrope: All Story, McSweeneys, and Opium, and he has been widely anthologized.

Greenman applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Slippage, and reported the following:

On page 69 of my book, the title has just been introduced: or rather, the concept of the title. The book is called The Slippage, and the concept of the slippage, which is actually part of page 67, comes from something that Tom, one of the main characters, says to William, the main character. Tom is an artist who makes charts and he defines the slippage as the moment when you start to lose your footing in the world—not your grip on reality, exactly, but your sense that your actions are especially meaningful, or that your choices truly direct the course of your own life. Instead, you start to see that maybe things happen without your input, and out of your control, that the universe is less hostile or friendly than ultimately indifferent. A different kind of crisis settles in. Tom tells William about the slippage at the end of a chapter, and page 69 is the beginning of the next chapter, and William is waking up in bed at night only to discover that his wife is not beside him. Don't worry! She's not missing or kidnapped or anything! She has just gone to the living room, where she was "sitting with her legs folded under her...television...on, but not the volume." A little while later she plays with a tube of lipstick, "swiveling it up and down, and William started to feel transfixed by the way it always went back where it came from." There are some of William's first conscious experiences of the slippage, and some of his last—one of the things about the book, I think, is that no one really learns. It's not based in epiphany. People go up and come back down like lipstick in a tube, and also like lipstick mostly what they do is leave a little trace of themselves, no less but no more.

Learn more about the book and author at Ben Greenman's website.

The Page 99 Test: A Circle Is a Balloon and Compass Both.

Writers Read: Ben Greenman.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Is This Tomorrow"

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times bestselling author of Pictures of You, which sold to six countries, went into five printings, and was a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick, a Costco "Pennie's Pick" and a NAIBA bestseller. Pictures of You is also a USA Today ebook bestseller and is on the Best Books of 2011 List from the San Francisco Chronicle, Providence Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Bookmarks Magazine. It's also one of Kirkus Reviews Top 5 books of 2011 about the Family and love.

Leavitt applied the Page 69 Test to Is This Tomorrow, her tenth and latest novel, and reported the following:

This is so funny, this page 69 test, because when I chose a portion for my readings, I actually chose pages 66-72.

This section is when 12-year-old Jimmy has vanished and the 1950s suburban neighborhood is in chaos. They’re already paranoid about the threat of Communism and a child vanishing disrupts their belief that the suburbs are paradise, that nothing bad can possibly happen in such an environment.

Cops are swarming around, questioning all the neighbors. Ava Lark, Jewish in a Christian neighborhood, divorced at a time when such a thing is pure scandal, a working mother at a time when women’s work was tending house and kids, with more than a few boyfriends and a relationship that seemed a bit too close with Jimmy, is suspect. These pages are about the cop questioning her, and as he does, we learn that he’s more interested in how she’s different from everyone else, than whether or not she has any real information about what really happened that terrible day.

View the trailer for Is This Tomorrow, and learn more about the book and author at Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.

My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.

Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt.

--Marshal Zeringue

"American Dream Machine"

Matthew Specktor is the author of the novels American Dream Machine and That Summertime Sound, as well as a nonfiction book about the motion picture The Sting. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The Paris Review, The Believer, Tin House, Black Clock, and Salon.com, among other publications. He is a senior editor and founding member of the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Specktor applied the Page 69 Test to American Dream Machine and reported the following:

Page 69 of American Dream Machine catches its characters in mid-argument. Beau Rosenwald, the novel's protagonist, is going up against his boss, a natty, closeted master of Old Hollywood named Sam Smiligan. It's 1968, and everything is coming apart at the seams. The argument is about whether Beau's client, the director Stanley Donen, should do a movie called Staircase (which Donen actually did direct in real life) or a hipper, shaggier film called Mellow Yellow, a sort of deadpan comedy in the vein of Blake Edwards' The Party. Beau, who represents the new Hollywood, is advocating for the latter. He will lose this argument, and within a page or three will lose any number of other things: temper, dignity, perhaps a button or two on his fly. He's about to let it all hang out.

"Why don't you get a job for those circus geeks you represent," Sam sneers at Beau, speaking of the sorts of actors, the Harry Dean Stanton types, represented by the younger agent, naturally unintelligible to one more inclined to Cary Grant and Rock Hudson.

Because they don't need me, Beau wanted to say. Because that's the way the business is turning. It's men like Stanley, your clients, who are in danger of extinction.

American Dream Machine is filled with such collisions. The book is a series of such clashes, really, a sequence of battles in which the irresistible force of one person's imagination comes up against the immovable object of another's. It how films are made, companies are built, and really, if you look at the tectonic plates of our country's political life--to say nothing of our own, personal, private ones--it's easy to see a scene like this as representative of all kinds of things. Besides which, there is the question of extinction, of obsolescence, which Beau himself will come up against later in the novel. We all do. Any shapely novel, I think, contains itself in microcosm over and over again. This one does, at least.

Learn more about the book and author at Matthew Specktor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Quintessence"

David Walton won the 2008 Philip K. Dick Award for his debut novel, Terminal Mind.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Quintessence, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Quintessence is representative of one of the three main characters, that of Catherine Parris, a young, independent, aristocrat's daughter who will run away to join a voyage to the end of the world. She has just told her father about a creature she saw... a creature that can turn invisible, walk through walls, and is armed with sharp teeth, pincers, and a scorpion-like tail. Far from frightened, Catherine draws the creature and analyzes it in her characteristically scientific style. Her father, however, is more concerned with her safety:

Father stared at the parchment silently for a long time. He tapped where she had written 'insubstantial'. "You saw Sinclair's beetle?"

"I saw it. This manticore is just as real."

He seemed to come to a decision and stood abruptly. "We'll search the house. Wherever you go, I want Henshawe with you, or one of the other servants. Someone is to sleep with you at all times. If you see it again, or even think you do, scream for help."

"How will you search the house for something invisible?"

"Maybe Sinclair will know." He pointed a finger at Catherine. "But no more experiments. I don't want you luring this thing anywhere near you."

"If I set out more meat, it might come again. You could see it yourself, and we could try to catch it."

"No. That's an order, Catherine. I'll talk to Sinclair, but in the meantime, I want you safe."

It doesn't tell you much about the other main characters, but it does capture the spirit of scientific discovery and sense of wonder that is so central to the book, as well as the danger of uncovering too much.

Learn more about the book and author at David Walton's website.

Writers Read: David Walton.

--Marshal Zeringue