"Sweet Sunday"

John Lawton has written seven Inspector Troy thrillers, two standalone novels, and a volume of history, and has edited several English writers (Wells, Conrad, D. H. Lawrence) for Everyman Classics. His thriller Black Out won a WH Smith Fresh Talent Award, A Little White Death was named a New York Times notable book, and his latest Troy novel A Lily of the Field was named one of the best thrillers of the year by the New York Times. His recent novels include Then We Take Berlin, the first book to feature Joe Wilderness, and the newly released Sweet Sunday.

Lawton applied the Page 69 Test to Sweet Sunday and reported the following:

Page 69 of Sweet Sunday is set in the book’s present, from which most of the rest of the novel is flashback. Oddly, it’s the scene that is most conventional – when Turner Raines meets with a detective from the NYPD and is told his buddy Mel was murdered. Conventional in that it’s a vital scene in any crime novel, odd because I never saw this as a crime novel as I wrote it. I saw it as a novel, in which crime plays a part. I’d say, if you were skimming and got to page 69, yes you’d probably read on because it is the point in the book when it most resembles the mystery it isn’t. If you’re hooked by that, then I’d like to hope the life of Turner Raines, unravelled in the next 200 pages, proves as engaging as any mystery.

Learn more about the book and author at John Lawton's website.

Writers Read: John Lawton.

--Marshal Zeringue