Thursday, July 26, 2007

"In Secret Service"

Mitch Silver is the author of In Secret Service, his debut novel which blends historical facts and figures with a fictional espionage plot.

He applied the "Page 69 Test" to In Secret Service and reported the following:
I've just had a chance to re-read Page 69 of In Secret Service and, yes, it's pretty representative of my book. It seems to be written in English and, as far as I know, the rest of the novel is, too.

The one little kink is, my book is really a dual story: Half is the secret manuscript called Provenance that Ian Fleming has written for posterity; and half is the story of the woman who opens this dangerous time capsule -- Amy Greenberg, an Associate Professor of Art History at Yale. As soon as she does, Amy finds bad guys coming out of the woodwork to get at her and her precious cargo. Page 69 is one of the modern pages about Amy; if you had chosen Page 68 for your blog, we would have heard my Ian Fleming character describing the somewhat twisted love life of Wallis Simpson before she became the Duchess of Windsor. And before she had her afternoon tryst in Kitzbuhel with Ian Fleming (my Page 83).

Page 69 also could have been (but isn't) one of the pages with showing one of the 30 or so historical documents woven into my story, from a picture of Hitler receiving the Windsors at Berchtesgaden to Rudolf Hess' dental records to a particularly incriminating note (written in German) on the Duke of Windsor's notepaper.

Still, it has Amy musing on how to counterfeit an illuminated manuscript like The Book of Kells, so yes, I'd have to say it's fairly representative.
Read an excerpt and learn more about In Secret Service at the official website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue