"Only the Good Die Young"

Chris Marie Green is the author of Only the Good Die Young, the first book in the Jensen Murphy, Ghost for Hire series from Penguin/Roc, which features a fun-loving spirit from the ’80s. She also wrote the urban fantasy Vampire Babylon series from Ace Books as well as The She Code, a “geek lit”/chick lit/new adult hybrid with comic book art work by Billy Martinez of Neko Press Comics.

Green applied the Page 69 Test to Only the Good Die Young and reported the following:

My page 69 focuses on an amateur detective doing some Internet investigation for a murder she’s trying to solve. The thing is, this detective, Jensen Murphy, happens to be a ghost from the 1980s. She was pulled out of a “time loop” by a psychic/medium in order to haunt a confession out of Gavin Edgett, a man who was suspected of murdering his fiancée, Elizabeth Dalton, three years ago.

And another thing? Jensen was murdered, too, and her death was such a shock that she went into that time loop, which numbed her to such a degree that she put up a mental wall, blocking the identity of her killer.

On page 69, Jensen is looking at newspaper articles and starting to become more and more fascinated with her human person of interest in the crime. But at the same time, she’s desperately trying to trigger a memory in her own case so she can solve her killing.

The murder case is the “framework” is this story, but a lot of the book also focuses on “Boo World”—the ghost dimension that Jensen is just getting used to. She’s a 1980s fish out of water in this new world as well as a spirit who is discovering ways to interact with the humans she misses. There are also many fun-loving ghosts populating Boo World, making the book’s tone something that I hope resembles vintage Supernatural.

From page 69:

There were pictures that I could barely look at: blond, tanned, beautiful Elizabeth on Gavin’s arm at society functions. He seemed rougher than she was in some way that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, because there he was, wearing a tux and seeming polished.

It was his eyes, really. A tough man who held everything in except when he was looking at the woman he loved.

And in these photos, he was looking down at Elizabeth as if she were the most precious thing in creation and he would do anything for her.

Was there an air of possession there, too?

My chest area went tight. Was this the way a killer watched his future prey? Had my murderer been tracking me in the same way, hiding his bloodlust from anyone who might’ve been looking?

I didn’t want to think that, maybe, it’d been one of my party friends who’d found me alone in the woods that night.

God, no way.

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Writers Read: Chris Marie Green.

--Marshal Zeringue