"The Things We Miss"

Leah Stecher was born and raised in Southern California and currently lives in coastal Maine. By day, she edits policy papers for an environmental nonprofit; by night, she writes middle grade fiction. She has strong opinions on tea blends, chocolate chip cookie recipes, and action movies.

Stecher applied the Page 69 Test to The Things We Miss, her debut middle grade novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 is the end of Chapter 8. Twelve-year-old misfit J.P. Green has recently discovered the magical treehouse door that lets her go three days forward in time, and in this moment she is riding high. She’s watching her Pop Pop—who has recovered from cancer—get out of a car unaided, and she’s remembering how much help he needed back when he was sick. His current health seems like a sign that everything is going right in her life—for the first time ever. The page ends with this exchange:

“What?” Pop Pop caught me smiling at him as he got out of the car in front of Thai Dishes.

“Nothing,” I said quickly. Nothing. Just, magic was real. Pop Pop was healthy and Mom wasn’t making me go shopping. “Nothing,” I repeated. “Just happy.”

I started this response by saying emphatically that the Page 69 Test did not work for The Things We Miss. But my mind changed as I wrote out all the reasons why not—and realized that they were actually pretty decent reasons why it would work as an introduction to the book!

The page does not introduce all of our most important characters. However, it does introduce J.P. and her Pop Pop—who is one of the most important side characters—and shows the depth of their relationship, which is a key element in the book. Moreover, J.P.’s relationships with her friends and family and the way that they strain and tear and come back together are the underlying fabric of this story, so a page that excavates any one of those relationships would give readers a clue that they could expect to see more like that throughout.

This page does not tell readers about how the magic works. But it does tell readers that magic is real in this book, in some form or another, and that our main character was thinking about it in the same breath as the everyday mundanity of going out to dinner and dealing with illness. This would hopefully give readers a sense that they had entered a contemporary world, with a bit of a speculative twist.

This page is mostly memories of the past, without context to understand their importance. However, this page does provide a number of warnings of what is to come for any readers who want to avoid books that deal with cancer. Taken as a standalone page, I found it a little ominous, like J.P.’s joy was too obviously about to be cut short. In many ways, this page serves a decent notification that this book may be quite sad at times!

Visit Leah Stecher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Morning Pages"

Kate Feiffer, a former television news producer, is an illustrator, and author of eleven highly acclaimed books for children, including Henry the Dog with No Tail and My Mom Is Trying to Ruin My Life. Morning Pages is her first novel for adults. Feiffer currently divides her time between Martha’s Vineyard, where she raised her daughter Maddy, and New York City, where she grew up.

She applied the Page 69 Test to Morning Pages and reported the following:

From page 69:

LAURIE (CONT.)

So what’s your news Pops?

LARRY

I sold my place. Nicolette and I bought a terrific house just a few miles down the road.

LAURIE

What? You what? You moved? Why didn’t you tell me you were moving?

LARRY

I’m telling you now.

LAURIE

Why didn’t you tell me before you moved?

LARRY

You were busy at work. I didn’t want to bother you. You’ll love the house. It was just built. Nicolette decided she wants to go into the interior design business, so I bought her a house to get her started. You should see what she can do with a room. I never noticed rooms before. They were all the same to me. Some had couches, some had beds, some had tables, but mostly, they were all the same. Nicolette sees things that should be in a room that I never thought about. She has a vision, which is good, since I’ve almost lost mine.

Morning Pages is about a playwright who is trying to revive her stalled-out career while managing the chaos and complications of family, friends, writer’s block, and romance. Scenes from the play she is writing are scattered throughout the book, and the play is revealed to be a story within a story. On page 69, there is a section from a scene in the play.

So does the Page 69 Test work for Morning Pages? I’d say, yes-ish. Page 69 has the humor and the hurt that readers will find throughout the novel.

On page 69, Laurie and her father Larry are at diner eating lunch and catching up. Larry tells Laurie that he and his wife, Nicolette, have moved into a new house so Nicolette can become an interior designer. Laurie is trying to digest the fact that her father actually sold his house and moved without telling her.

One of the themes explored in the novel is the relationship we have as adults with our parents and the emotional hold they continue to hold over us decades after we’ve moved out, even after we’ve had our own children. And yet, why do we still seek their approval? Why do we regress when we are around our parents? Why do our childhood hurts still sting? And how do we manage our parents’ care with compassion as they get older and needier?

Visit Kate Feiffer's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Reunion"

Elise Juska’s new novel, Reunion, was named one of People Magazine’s “Best Books to Read in May 2024.” Her previous novels include The Blessings, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and If We Had Known. Juska’s fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The Missouri Review, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Electric Literature, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize from Ploughshares, and her short fiction has been cited by The Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. She teaches creative writing at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia.

Juska applied the Page 69 Test to Reunion and reported the following:

On the opening page of Chapter Five, Polly has just driven eight hours from New York and is, reluctantly, nearing her old college campus on the coast of Maine. She has no desire to attend her twenty-fifth reunion, for reasons that are revealed later, and agreed to this trip only because her son Jonah—after struggling through his senior year of pandemic schooling online—surprised her by suggesting he come with her and visit a friend on an island nearby.

The simple beauty of the Maine island is far different from Brooklyn, where mother and son have been stuck in a small apartment for much of the past fifteen months, and from the classically elegant college campus to which Polly is apprehensive about returning:

A quiet two-lane road ambled down the middle of the island, dotted with humble cottages and pockets of evergreens, splashed with sunlight. Behind them, serene coves and wooden docks slipped in and out of view, the water salted with boats and buoys. Polly was an avowed indoor person, but the few times she’d come out there with Adam in college, she’d been stunned by its beauty. It had seemed incongruous that this place should exist so close to campus, and still did; it nearly allowed her to forget where she was going next.

In some ways, The Page 69 Test misses the mark, because so much of the novel takes place at the reunion and focuses on the three friends and this moment does neither. Yet in a larger sense, the test works. The scene where Polly and Jonah arrive on the island is about leaving one place for another, a dynamic that’s revisited throughout the novel and very much at the core of what it’s about: moving from childhood to adulthood, from college to the real world, from life before the pandemic to life after, and the difficulty of ever going back.

Visit Elise Juska's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Lonesome Place for Dying"

Nolan Chase lives and works in the Pacific Northwest.

A Lonesome Place for Dying is his first book featuring Ethan Brand.

Chase applied the Page 69 Test to A Lonesome Place for Dying and reported the following:

A Lonesome Place for Dying is about the new chief of police of the small border town of Blaine, Washington. Someone is trying to kill Ethan Brand; at the same time, the small force must investigate the murder of Laura Dill, a young woman found stabbed by the train tracks.

On page 69, Ethan shows Laura’s father and aunt the body to get an identification. He knows this is necessary to help find Laura’s killer, but he’s attuned to the family’s grief.

Robert Dill stared at the face and shook his head. For a beat, Ethan thought not her, and felt a blast of relief. But then Lorrie Dill touched her brother’s arm, and Robert let out a sob.

“It’s,” he gasped for a breath. “Yes, it’s her.”

“You’re positive?” Ethan asked.

“Yes, sir.”

He nodded to Sandra through the window to cover the face. Lorrie wrapped her arms around the grieving father, tilting her own head up as if gravity would help hold back her tears…

Robert Dill looked like a gate battered off its hinges.

A Lonesome Place for Dying is a small-town mystery with a compelling lead character: solving the case matters to Ethan, and so does survival, but he’s a different kind of detective, interested in human nature as well. If a reader checks out this, and maybe the opening chapter, they’ll have a good sense of what Ethan is about.

Visit Nolan Chase's website.

Writers Read: Nolan Chase.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bad Men"

Julie Mae Cohen is a UK-bestselling author of book club and romantic fiction, including the award-winning novel Together. Her work has been translated into 17 languages. She is vice president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in the UK. Cohen grew up in western Maine and studied English at Brown University, Cambridge University, and the University of Reading, where she is now an associate lecturer in creative writing. She lives in Berkshire in the United Kingdom.

Cohen applied the Page 69 Test to Bad Men, her first thriller, and reported the following:

On page 69 of the hardback version of Bad Men, my protagonist Saffy, a wealthy and beautiful socialite, tells her younger sister Susie that she’s leaving London and going up to Scotland to see someone. Her sister, typically, jumps to the conclusion that Saffy is going to Scotland for a date and she says to Saffy, “I want you to go up to Scotland and catch yourself a dangerous, sexy man.”

We quickly see that Saffy has indeed gone up to Scotland to see a man. However, she’s not on a date. She is stalking a man called Jonathan Desrosiers: surveilling him from her car, looking through a rubbish bin to see what interesting things he’s thrown away, and secretly following him to his remote cabin, which in her opinion "looks mostly suitable for goats, not people.”

Saffy, without being spotted, leaves Jon to wallow in his damp, dismal cabin, and goes zooming off in her high-powered and expensive car to Inverness, where she pulls up outside a dog shelter. “As I get out of the car, a chorus of barks starts up from the back.”

And that is the end of page 69.

On the face of it, page 69 doesn’t give us such a good idea of the entire book. Bad Men is a serial killer thriller, and no one gets killed on page 69. There are no decapitated heads or blood, worse luck.

However, in another, deeper way, page 69 is a very good indication indeed of the entire book. Because aside from being a serial killer thriller—the story of murderer Saffy, who kills bad men—my novel is also a really deeply twisted romcom. And on page 69, I turn several romcom tropes on their head.

Her sister Susie, who doesn’t know about Saffy’s murderous hobby, wants Saffy to meet someone “dangerous”—but the twist is that Saffy is the dangerous one. Saffy isn’t going up to Scotland to date a man; she’s going to stalk him. Jonathan is in fact her love interest, not someone she’s planning to murder…but you wouldn’t know that from page 69. And as we discover on the following pages, Saffy is going to a dog shelter not to adopt an adorable puppy as a romantic gift, but to pick up an unwanted dog to use it to engineer a strange and dramatic “meet-cute” with Jon. Let’s put it this way: the dog doesn’t get hurt, but she doesn’t like it very much, either.

The dog goes on to become an important character in the novel, and in fact the UK version of the novel has a picture of her on the back cover. Several reviewers have said they get worried about the dog after page 69, but I’m reassuring you again: the dog doesn’t suffer at all and ends up having a great life.

Unlike the many, many bad men who reach a messy end.

Does Saffy get Jon to notice her? Do they go on a date and fall in love? Or does she have to kill him? You’ll have to read the book to find out.

Visit Julie Mae Cohen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Judge"

Peter Colt was born in Boston, MA in 1973 and moved to Nantucket Island shortly thereafter. He is a 1996 graduate of the University of Rhode Island and a 24-year veteran of the Army Reserve with deployments to Kosovo and Iraq. He is a police officer in a New England city and the married father of two boys.

Colt applied the Page 69 Test to his new Andy Roark mystery, The Judge, and reported the following:

From page 69:

I settled in and poured myself a tallish whiskey. I called Angela Estrella.

“It’s Roark,” I said when she answered.

“Any progress?” she asked in lieu of an actual greeting.

“Some. Someone tried to shoot me tonight.”

There was a sharp intake of breath on her end. “Are you okay?”

“Yes. Sadly, my car isn’t. It took the brunt of it.”

On page 69 of The Judge Boston Private Eye Andy Roark, who has been hired to investigate a case of blackmail returns home after someone tries to kill him by shooting at him while he’s in his car. While most people would be rattled or at least upset, Roark is upbeat as he calls Angella Estrella, he’s client’s attractive assistant. He tells her what happened, and she is shocked. Roark points out that this is a positive turn of events, that they are making progress. Then he flirts with her and for the first time in the book makes some romantic headway.

Opening the book to page 69 and reading that page will give the reader a very good idea of what the story is about. On page 69 Roark tells the reader what he has been doing for the last few days on the case. That alone would inform the reader that it is a case of blackmail. The reader would see that there is already a suspect but that he is difficult to track down, but Roark sees that as the best way of going about things. The inherent danger of the case is immediately clear but more importantly we see the protagonist’s response to it which gives us a great deal of insight into the character himself. For this book, this would be an excellent test for the reader.

I wrote this book because I wanted to write a story that was a straight up crime story. I wanted the villains to be pedestrian and believable. In other books my villains have been spies, assassins, or elite soldiers, or the crimes involved have been a little over the top. With this story I wanted something a little more grounded and that is why I really like the story.

Visit Peter Colt's website.

My Book, The Movie: Back Bay Blues.

The Page 69 Test: Back Bay Blues.

Q&A with Peter Colt.

The Page 69 Test: Death at Fort Devens.

My Book, The Movie: Death at Fort Devens.

My Book, The Movie: The Ambassador.

The Page 69 Test: The Ambassador.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bad Boy Beat"

Clea Simon is the Boston Globe-bestselling author of three nonfiction books and thirty-one mysteries, including World Enough and Hold Me Down, both of which were named “Must Reads” by the Massachusetts Center for the Book.

A graduate of Harvard University and former journalist, she has contributed to publications ranging from Salon.com and Harvard Magazine to Yankee and The New York Times.

Simon’s latest mystery is Bad Boy Beat, which kicks off a fast-paced amateur sleuth series starring Em Kelton, a Boston crime reporter with a nose for news.

The author applied the Page 69 Test to Bad Boy Beat and reported the following:

From page 69:

that again—she’d confirmed what Simpson already knew. Nicky’s wasn’t the first body on that gun. I guess it’s some satisfaction to know it would be the last.

It’s not much, but it’s a start. I cruise by the cop shop on my way to the Standard but I don’t stop. Wherever he slept, Jack’s probably only now rousing, and with everyone back in their offices once again, I don’t see a place to park. Besides, I don’t want to push Saul more than I need to. I can spend an hour looking up city councilors on the parking lot break-ins while I wait for Jack to surface. Maybe I’ll even try Benny again, now that I’m pretty sure I’m not stepping on Roz’s painted toes.


“Earth to Em.”

Damn it! I sit up with enough of a start that I have to grab my mug. From the eyes on me, I can tell I’d visibly nodded off, right in the ten o’clock meeting. Maybe even snored. But my mug had stayed upright, so I couldn’t have been out that long. Could I?

“Sorry, boss.” Sometimes it’s best to just own up to it. Truth be told, Saul looks worried rather than angry. “I was staking out a source’s place last night and slept in my car.”

“So, what did you get?” He’s not sure he believes me, and I don’t have anything to make my case.

“He didn’t come home.” Borelli, over to my right, ducks his head, but I can see he’s smirking. Ruggle is staring at me with puppy dog eyes. He can tell this is personal for me, and at that moment I hate him. “Waste of a night,” I push back. God help me, I toss my hair. “Most of my other contacts aren’t up at this hour, but I’ll get more tonight.”

“Not by deadline then.” Saul, moving on.

Ruggle is waiting when the meeting ends, bouncing on the balls of his feet as if he’s about to attempt a jump shot. I don’t see myself as a basket, so I do my best to rush by him.

“Wait, Em.” He’s too close behind me to ignore, so I turn with a glare designed to shut him down.

“What?” If the glare doesn’t do it, the bark should.

“I was wondering, do you need some help with the database?”

Now he’s got my attention. I stare, waiting for the second head to appear.

“You know, the ATF database of ballistics records.”

It rings a bell in my tired brain. “Yeah, that’s national, right?”

Yes! Bad Boy Beat passes! Page 69 drops readers right into the middle of Em Kelton’s determined search for a mystery killer and also shows the obstacles – some self-imposed – that she faces.

The page opens with a confirmation: “Nicky’s wasn’t the first body on that gun.” That lets you know you’re dealing with murder, more than one, and that Em has already started to put together her case that the one random street crime that starts this book is really part of a series of planned killings.

It also has her dozing off at an editorial meeting at the Standard, the newspaper where she works, which is for better or worse, pure Em. When I was revising this book, my agent expressed the concern that Em wasn’t “likable.” I countered that she didn’t have to be likable as long as she was relatable (and what’s with insisting that women characters be likable anyway? Should we also tell them to smile more?). Em has some bad habits, and she’s not a model employee. Here, we see her at her worst: not only nodding off but disappointing her editor, all while she watches the male reporters at the meeting with suspicion. Are they out for her or are they allies? Em’s not one to take any chances, and the reference to “Roz’s painted toes” hints that the only colleague she fully trusts is her BFF Roz, a City Hall reporter. But the page does end with another avenue for investigation opening up. I’ll leave it up to the reader to figure out if Em has enough sense to follow through.

Visit Clea Simon's website.

The Page 69 Test: To Conjure a Killer.

--Marshal Zeringue