He applied the Page 69 Test to Beat the Reaper, his debut novel, and reported the following:Page 69 of Beat the Reaper is a disquisition on the the way the American Mafia has traditionally made money, and how different that is from popular perceptions. I wouldn't call it highly representative of the book as a whole (in fact, how the hell did that get in there? don't I have copy editors?) but my visceral dislike for romanticized presentations of the Mafia, and fascination with the underlying truth, were some of the reasons I felt I could make a mob book interesting. Page 69 also has a line that I like but that some people felt should be cut, in which I call Waste Management "a multinational corporation so scary it made the mafia look like little girls in those competitions JonBenet Ramsey used to enter." On that score page 69 is completely representational of the book as a whole.Read or listen to an excerpt and learn more about the book and author at the Beat the Reaper website.
Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.
--Marshal Zeringue
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