"Shattered"

Jay Bonansinga is the author of several acclaimed suspense novels, as well as a number of original screenplays currently in development in Hollywood.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his latest book, Shattered, and reported the following:

Shattered is my latest novel featuring my durable, continuing character, FBI profiler Ulysses Grove. I have to confess, after cooking up four Grove books, the man has spontaneously broken the bonds of my meager imagination and taken on a will of his own. I always look forward to see what the hell he’s going to do or say. In Shattered, Grove encounters a psychopath with a very unique, very disturbing agenda – an agenda that ultimately targets Grove’s own family.

Now for page 69: In this fascinating, albeit arbitrary, exercise -- analyzing a single page in order to draw tip-of-the-iceberg extrapolations -- I was pleasantly surprised to find something interesting afoot. The killer is in the process of entering a maximum-security prison in order to set in motion a diabolical series of events. (A quick aside: Years ago, I had an editor who said, “Jay, I really need something ‘major’ to be happening by page 100.” I must have learned the lesson well.) By the time the reader reaches page 69 in Shattered, they should be locked into this weird, evil Rube-Goldberg plot. Or at least that’s the hope. Plus, my prime directive of triangulating sensory description – as inculcated upon me by one of our masters, David Morrell – is fully in effect: “…a moldy-smelling foyer painted baby-vomit green…” Not bad for a suburban brat from Peoria who learned to write by reading EC comics.

Read an excerpt from Shattered, and learn more about the author and his work at Jay Bonansinga's website.

Watch the video for Shattered.

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

--Marshal Zeringue