"Missing Persons"

Clare O'Donohue worked on the HGTV show, Simply Quilts for four seasons, eventually becoming the Supervising Producer, and has written and produced for a lot of other shows as well. In the last twelve years, she worked on shows for The History Channel, truTV, Food Network, A&E, Discovery, TLC, and others.

In 2008 she published The Lover’s Knot, the first in the Someday Quilts series, and followed the debut with A Drunkard’s Path and The Double Cross. The Devil’s Puzzle, the fourth novel in the series, arrives in the fall of 2011.

O'Donohue applied the Page 69 Test to Missing Persons, the first novel in her new, edgier mystery series, and reported the following:

In Missing Persons, Kate Conway is a freelance TV producer working on a true crime show. I know something about this as I'm also a freelance TV producer, and I've done my fair share of true crime. It's a hard type of show to produce. On one hand, you spend a fair amount of time with the friends and family of a murder victim so you get to know them, and often like them. On the other hand TV is about entertainment, so the job comes with a fair amount of manipulation. On page 69, Kate is in the middle of setting up a situation in which she hopes to catch the mother of missing 22-year-old nursing student at a vulnerable moment so Kate can tape this for the show. She's feeling a little icky about putting a family through any more and she has a load of problems herself. Her about to be ex-husband has died, and Kate is the number one suspect in his possible homicide. Now that she finally knows what it's like to lose someone in unusual circumstances, exploiting other people's misery isn't as much fun - but on page 69, Kate has a mortgage to pay, so she does what she has to.

Learn more about the book and author at Clare O'Donohue's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue