"Walk Into Silence"

Susan McBride is the USA Today bestselling author of the Debutante Dropout Mysteries and the River Road Mysteries. She has won a Lefty Award, been twice nominated for the Anthony Award, and received the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award for Best Amateur Sleuth.

McBride applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, Walk Into Silence, and reported the following:

From page 69:

“Boys already walked the perimeter of both houses and beat the bushes before you even got here. I knocked on a few doors myself. None of the neighbors saw squat.”

She walked beside him, back to the driveway where Lisa Barton stood. The woman turned up her coat collar, tucking hands in her pockets. She looked a bit like an actress from one of those Hitchcock movies Hank liked to talk about with her blonde hair, calf-length coat, and high heels. Though she was a little rough around the edges to be Grace Kelly.

“Did you find her?” she asked as they approached.

“Naw,” Hank said, “just a cat.”

He gave Jo a glance that made her cheeks warm. She touched her shoulder where the animal had hit her, feeling stupid.

“Poor Jenny. She should’ve gotten help,” Lisa murmured, brow cinched. “If she’d done what was best for her, this wouldn’t be happening.”

“Back to the scarf,” Jo said. “Mrs. Dielman told her husband she’d lost it.”

Lisa sighed. “Jenny seemed to have problems remembering a lot of things lately. The other day, she locked herself out. Thank goodness, I had a spare key.”

“So maybe she was flaky,” Jo replied. “But that doesn’t explain why she’d disappear for twenty-four hours without calling her husband, then show up here and vandalize your property, Ms. Barton.”

“Who else could it be?” Lisa crossed her arms tightly. “Who else would want to send me a message?”

“What message?” Jo felt like she was missing something. “You think Jenny had a grudge against you?”

“I’d say so, yeah.” The woman shook tousled bangs from her eyes and looked dead-on at Jo. “I’m pretty sure she imagined I was having an affair with Patrick.”

As Walk Into Silence is about a missing woman, Jenny Dielman, there are a lot of questions in the book: who was Jenny really, was she losing her mind, did she leave on her own or was she harmed, were those around her trustworthy? So I think the scene on page 69 gives a decent sense of the investigation that Jo Larsen leads into Jenny’s disappearance. In this chapter, the next-door neighbor has asserted that Jenny vandalized her house. But was it really Jenny? Is anything the neighbor has to say about Jenny worth believing? What is the truth and who is telling it? Those are things Jo asks herself and must find out before she can figure out what happened to Jenny and why.

Learn more about the book and author at Susan McBride's website.

My Book, The Movie: Walk Into Silence.

--Marshal Zeringue