Sunday, June 28, 2009

"Trust No One"

Gregg Hurwitz is the author of several critically acclaimed thrillers, most recently The Crime Writer which was a finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the ITW Best Novel of the Year award. In addition to his novels, Hurwitz has written screenplays for several major Hollywood studios and is currently writing for Marvel Comics.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to his new novel, Trust No One, and reported the following:
Trust No One is really two interlaced thrillers. One tells the story of what happened to Nick Horrigan when he was a seventeen-year-old kid, and the other -- the main one -- shows what's happening to him now. The book opens with a bang, when he's dragged from bed by a SWAT team, hauled outside to a waiting Black Hawk, and told that a terrorist has seized control of a nuclear power plant and is threatening to blow it up...unless he can talk to Nick.

Nick has no idea who the hell this guy is.

Nick's a classic Hitchcockian Everyman, but as I alluded to earlier, he had something horrible happen when he was younger. Page 69 shows what happens after his beloved stepfather is murdered (and Nick left to feel responsible). Nick has just gotten into a fight with his mother, who stormed out of the house. The phone rings, and an ominous caller makes an indirect threat on his mother's life. He's told to part the front curtains, and when he does, he sees a dark sedan parked at the curb. "Come outside," the voice demands. P. 69 shows what happens when Nick walks out of his house in the night to that dark sedan, and it is the defining moment of his young life.

I hope the page is representative of a book with a lot of twists and turns -- and suspense. But even more than that, it catches a key moment in the story, where the entire plot hangs in the balance.
Read an excerpt from Trust No One and watch the video trailer.

Learn more about the book and author at Gregg Hurwitz's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue