"Butterfly Kills"

Brenda Chapman began her writing career in children’s fiction. Her YA novel Hiding in Hawk's Creek was shortlisted for the CLA Book of the Year for Children. Her first adult mystery, In Winter's Grip, was published in 2010. She lives in Ottawa, Ontario.

Chapman applied the Page 69 Test to Butterfly Kills, the latest novel in her Stonechild and Rouleau mystery series, and reported the following:

On page 69 of Butterfly Kills, Kala Stonechild is reminiscing with a woman named Marjory about a recent disappointment by a family member that haunts Stonechild still. Marjory is not a close friend, but she knows Kala from her childhood living on Birdtail Reservation and has an idea of how tough life has been for her in the intervening years. Kala is reluctant to speak about herself in this scene or to share any feelings about that period of her life when she was in foster care and moved from one family to another. The passage further reveals that Stonechild is restless and unattached, unsure about staying in Kingston for longer than a few months. Page 69 gives a taste of the continuing storyline about Kala Stonechild—my conflicted, solitary main cop—and her demons, which are slowly revealed throughout the series.

This sliver of the novel also shows that I am as interested in writing about the lives of my continuing main police characters as I am in the cases they are solving. This reflects my own penchant for reading police procedurals that delve into the background stories of the detectives and develop their characters and relationships along with the unfolding murder investigations.

Visit Brenda Chapman's website.

--Marshal Zeringue