He applied the Page 69 Test to The Sleeping and the Dead, his first mystery, and reported the following:From Page 69:Learn more about the book and author at Jeff Crook's website.After I left Deiter's, I got a call from Preston Park to photograph a wreck on I-240 involving a tractor trailer and a motorcycle. The biker earlied-out beneath the trailer, doing an estimated buck-twenty. There wasn’t much left of him above the zipper except a big red dent on the trailer's back door. His mother called Preston Park wanting to sue the truck driver, the trucking company, the city of Memphis and maybe God Himself for making it rain. The scene was jacked up on epic scale, traffic jammed for eight miles, car after car full of Adam Henrys trolling for a look at the corpse folded up under the truck axle. It was enough to make you hate people on principle, but I was happy not to see the motorcyclist anywhere. He hadn't hung around and I was starting to think God had let this cup pass from me.This scene is Jackie in a nutshell - her voice, her brutal cynical language, her job, and her special ability. The heroine of The Sleeping and the Dead is Jackie Lyons. She photographs accident scenes for lawyers and homicides for the chief of the homicide unit of the Memphis Police Department. Jackie also sees ghosts. Her abilities are what draws her into the investigation of the notorious Playhouse Killer.
--Marshal Zeringue
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