"Life, Loss, and Puffins"

Catherine Ryan Hyde is the author of more than forty published and forthcoming books.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, Life, Loss, and Puffins, and reported the following:

Page 69 text (very brief text in brackets is from the page before and after):

[“Ru,” she said. “Just the person I was looking for. I’m so, so sorry to hear about your mother.”]

I stopped cold and just stood there, refusing to look at her.

“Who did you hear that from?”

“I just spoke with your aunt on the phone.”

Another freezing slide of cold down my gullet as if I’d swallowed an ice cube whole. Aunt Bitsy had that effect on people.

“She called you?”

“Yes, she needed your address at the Gulbranson’s, so she can come pick you up. I asked why she didn’t get it from you but she said you’re not picking up calls. Which I guess is understandable at a time like this. You didn’t have to come to classes today, you know.”

“Did you give her the address?”

“Not yet. I have to call her back. First I had to come talk to you and make sure you really do have an aunt named Bitsy Milford. I’m not in the habit of telling people where my students can be found unless I know for a fact who the person is who’s asking.”

“Thank you,” I said, feeling that the ice cube had reached my slightly upset stomach.

“You don’t have to call her back. I’ll call her and make an arrangement for her to pick me up.”

“We’ll miss you,” she said, and I saw genuine regret on her face. Which felt odd. Other than Ms. Stepanian, I didn’t know anyone [at the university had gotten particularly attached to me. “And again, my sincere condolences about your mother.”]

I’ve done quite a few of these Page 69 Tests now, and I have very mixed feelings about this one.

On the whole I’ll say no, I don’t think it represents the book especially well. The book is quirky, and this scene… not so much. Without context it feels a bit ordinary to me, and I honestly do not think that’s a word many people would use to describe this novel.

Oddly, whether or not this page comes through—that is, in a way that results in the book being taken home and read—hinges on whether or not the person has read the promotional text. I tend to, but some people make a point of knowing nothing going in. If you haven’t read the brief summary of the book, it seems a bit ordinary when Ru says, “You don’t have to call her back. I’ll call her and make an arrangement for her to pick me up.” Just “housekeeping.” If you have read it, then you know she has no intention of going to live with her aunt, and that, in fact, she’s about to take off with her friend Gabriel and have adventures for as long as it takes them to get caught. In fact, if I could have gone a few more sentences, in the last sentence of the scene she calls Gabriel and says “We have to go now. Not at the end of the month. We have to go today.” That makes it all a bit more weighty and interesting. But alas, it’s on page 70.

The main way in which this particular page 69 fails the test is by not including Gabriel. Ru is my protagonist, my viewpoint character, and quirky and indispensable in her own right. But Gabriel. Wonderful Gabriel. Gabriel is the heart and soul of this novel. And if he’s not on the page, then the page does not represent the book well.

Visit Catherine Ryan Hyde's website.

Q&A with Catherine Ryan Hyde.

The Page 69 Test: Brave Girl, Quiet Girl.

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The Page 69 Test: So Long, Chester Wheeler.

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--Marshal Zeringue

"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

"Dear Edna Sloane"

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the novels Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far Is the Ocean From Here. She has worked as an editor at Medium, JSTOR, Conde Nast, and other organizations, and has taught creative writing at NYU, Sackett Street Writers Workshop, Gotham Writers Workshops, Catapult, Story Studio Chicago, The Resort LIC, and the Yale Writers' Workshop. Shearn's work has appeared in many publications including the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, O: The Oprah Magazine, and Coastal Living. She has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

Shearn applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Dear Edna Sloane, and reported the following:

On this page, Seth Edwards is speaking directly to Edna Sloane. Up until now, he has mostly been writing and posting elsewhere, trying to piece together what happened to her and how he might find her. He sends her, here, a kind of a plea: He articulates that he wants to write something as good as her novel someday, and he also asks her to do an interview with him, which he thinks will be good for his career in media. Then he shares a memory of reading her book on a grassy hill in Iowa City, where he went to graduate school, and describes how the book took over his reality in that moment, and also how thunderstorms feel in Iowa.

This page is an uncannily accurate microcosm of the book as a whole! Like honestly weirdly so.

We have on this page a portrait of Seth’s warring desires – he wants to tell Edna how much he appreciates her work, and at the same time is urging her to do the very thing she has clearly avoided on purpose for nearly 30 years, which is to curate a public persona. And we see the germ of when Seth started to develop both his obsession with her novel and his idea that he somehow deserves literary greatness just because he’s gone to the “right” MFA program. He thinks he understands her so completely, because he relates to her novel’s protagonist. But in this letter, he is proving that in some ways, he’s totally bought into exactly what she’s resisting, i.e. the literary-industrial-complex of it all.

Visit Amy Shearn's website.

The Page 99 Test: How Far Is the Ocean from Here.

Writers Read: Amy Shearn (March 2013).

Q&A with Amy Shearn.

My Book, The Movie: Dear Edna Sloane.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies"

Catherine Mack (she/her) is the pseudonym for the USA Today and Globe & Mail bestselling author of over a dozen novels. Her books are approaching two million copies sold worldwide and have been translated into multiple languages including French, German, and Polish. Television rights to her new novel, Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies, and its sequels sold in a major auction to Fox TV for development into a series, with Mack writing the pilot script. She splits her time between Canada and the US.

Mack applied the Page 69 Test to Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies and reported the following:

Page 69 of Every Time I Go on Vacation, Someone Dies begins thusly:

“That asshole.”

“Be nice.”

“Why? He’s refused to blurb me a million times, and his review of Highland Killing in the New York Times called it ‘derivative’.”

“Amazing how good your memory is when it has to do with insults.”

This is an exchange between the main character, Eleanor Dash, and her sister, Harper. It is entirely indicative of the tone of the book and the dynamic between those two characters. They’re talking about a third character, Shek, who is, in fact, an asshole. So yep, yep, yep, ding, ding, ding. From this we know that Eleanor is 1) a writer of mysteries, 2) holds grudges, 3) being reviewed in the New York Times, 4) mad about it, 5) free with her thoughts, opinions, and swear words, and 6) comfortable with whoever she is speaking to. I guess we don’t know that a murder is about to occur, but the title gives that away! So, I’d say the book passed the page 69 test! Woohoo, I love passing tests. Passing is better than failing, don’t you agree?

Visit Catherine McKenzie's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Death in the Details"

Katie Tietjen is an award-winning writer, teacher, and school librarian. A Frances Glessner Lee enthusiast, she’s traveled thousands of miles to visit her homes, see her nutshells, and even attend her birthday party. Tietjen lives in New England with her husband and two sons.

She applied the Page 69 Test to Death in the Details, her first novel, and reported the following:

On page 69, my main character, Maple, is interacting with Kenny (a young officer in the sheriff’s department) for the first time. He has just driven her home after she discovered a dead body across town:

Kenny nodded once, solemnly. “Sometimes the wheels of justice turn slowly.”

Maple barely restrained herself from rolling her eyes. Enough is enough, she decided. Self-reflection was one thing. Sitting here enduring earnest cliches from a kid was another. Steadying the dollhouse with her left hand, Maple opened the door with her right and climbed awkwardly out as Kenny scurried around to the back and pulled Maple’s wheelbarrow out.

“Where can I put this for you, ma’am?”

He was so eager. It made her weary.

“Oh, just leave it there. Thank you, Kenny.” She shifted the dollhouse onto her hip and pulled out her house key from her coat pocket with her free hand.

“Uh, actually, ma’am, it’s Ken,” he said in a deeper voice.

“That’s how my—the sheriff should’ve introduced me.”

Maple’s supply of patient niceties had officially run dry. She let herself in her front door and closed it on Ken-not-Kenny’s goodbye.

Page 69 gives a great little slice of plot and character, as it turns out! At this point in the story, Maple has discovered the body at the center of the mystery and has just met the character who will become her sidekick/ partner. Browsers who turn to this page will get a good sense of both Maple and Kenny’s personalities: her, prickly and brooding and him, eager and earnest.

To me, their relationship is one of the most fun aspects of the book. I had a blast writing their scenes together. They develop a deep mutual respect and friendship as the book progresses, but along the way their vastly different personalities and attitudes cause them to drive each other bonkers on multiple occasions.

My favorite part on page 69 is when she closes the door in his face mid-sentence because he’s irritating her and she just runs out of bandwidth; I think it’s an impulse many of us have, but one we rarely act on. Over the course of the story, she helps him get rid of his rose-colored glasses and he helps her shed some of her cynicism—transitions both of them needed to make in order to move forward in their lives, but likely wouldn’t have been able to make without each other’s influence.

Visit Katie Tietjen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Days of Wonder"

Caroline Leavitt is the New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of Days of Wonder, With or Without You, Cruel Beautiful World, Is This Tomorrow, Pictures of You, Girls In Trouble, Coming Back To Me, Living Other Lives, Into Thin Air, Family, Jealousies, Lifelines, and Meeting Rozzy Halfway. Many of her titles were optioned for film, translated into different languages, and condensed in magazines. Many of her titles were Best Books of the Year and Indie Next Picks. A New York Foundation of the Arts Fellow, she was also shortlisted for the Maine Readers Prize, and was a Goldenberg Fiction Prize winner. She recently won an award from the MidAtlantic Arts for portions of her next novel, The Inseparables.

Leavitt applied the Page 69 Test to Days of Wonder and reported the following:

Days of Wonder is written in a dual time line, one section following the characters all the way up to a terrible crime, and the other section is about how their lives unfold afterwards. This page 69 is actually the very first moment in one timeline where we meet young, innocent, naive Ella.

Page 69 begins a new chapter, with Ella, who lives in a poor area of Brooklyn, going to a fancy party on the Upper East Side. What we learn on that page is that she’s afraid to go in, afraid she isn’t pretty enough or wearing the right clothes. Afraid she doesn’t belong. And at the same time, like in any Romeo & Juliet part of a story (or West Side Story, as the case may be), she has this feeling that something might happen to her.

This is a book about two kids, Ella and Jude, who fall in love, and don’t want to be separated by Jude’s abusive dad, so they fantasize killing him. And then the fantasy starts to become reality, except it’s an attempted murder neither one remembers. If you knew the opening of the book, or if you knew what the book was about, this page 69 would make you want to know more, because this is the Before part of the dark After. I thought seeing her so young and girlish juxtaposed nicely with the start of the novel, where not only is she clearly not innocent, but she’s getting out of prison in a media storm and desperate to recreate a new life and new identity.

Learn more about the book and author at Caroline Leavitt's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Pictures of You.

My Book, the Movie: Pictures of You.

The Page 69 Test: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Is This Tomorrow.

My Book, The Movie: Cruel Beautiful World.

The Page 69 Test: Cruel Beautiful World.

Writers Read: Caroline Leavitt (October 2016).

My Book, The Movie: Days of Wonder.

Q&A with Caroline Leavitt.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Good Deed"

Helen Benedict, a British-American professor at Columbia University, is the author of seven previous novels, six books of nonfiction, and a play. Her newest novel is The Good Deed.

The Good Deed, set in a refugee camp in Greece, comes out of the research Benedict conducted for her 2022 nonfiction book, Map of Hope and Sorrow, co-authored with Syrian writer and refugee, Eyad Awwadawnan and endorsed by Jessica Bruder (Nomadland), Dina Nayari (The Ungrateful Refugee) and Christy Lefteri (The Beekeeper of Aleppo), among others. That book earned PEN's Jean Stein Grant for Literary Oral History in 2021 and praise from The New York Times, The Guardian, Kirkus Reviews, and elsewhere.

Benedict applied the Page 69 Test to The Good Deed and reported the following:

What a fun idea this Page 69 Test is! And it works pretty well for my novel, The Good Deed, which is set in a refugee camp on the Greek island of Samos.

On this page, two of the main characters in the novel are talking: 19-year-old Amina, a refugee from Syria who badly misses the mother who refused to flee with her; and middle-aged Nafisa, a refugee from Sudan who lost her own children to war and has grown resigned and yet bitter about fate. Amina looks up to Nafisa, who has become something of a mother figure for her.

The two women are sitting on a mountainside above the refugee camp in which they live. The passage is told in Amina's voice and she is talking about when she first went home after being held and tortured in prison for no more reason than writing a poem that Bashar al-Assad, the president of Syria, did not like.

Amina says to Nafisa;

"Yet when I came home and said, "Look, Mama, I'm alive. I'm alive for you," she deserted me only a few days later. How could she have done that?"

Nafisa shifts against the tree and brushes off the ants and dust that have collected on her skirt. "She must have had her reasons. Mothers usually do."

"Even a reason to abandon me?"

Nafisa bows her head at this. But offers no reply.

Seeing that I have caused her pain, I change the subject.

"Auntie, do you remember that old woman tourist we saw the other day? The one who nodded at us?"

"The one with the ugly hat? Yes, she took me for coffee."

"She did? Why, what did she want?"

Nafisa shrugs. "I neither know nor care. But what about her?"

"I only wonder what it would be like to change places with her; for her to be me and me her."

"You wouldn't want to be that woman."

"That woman" is the one who does the "good deed" of the book's title, and causes a great deal of trouble after doing it.

Learn more about Helen Benedict and her work.

My Book, The Movie: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Sand Queen.

The Page 69 Test: Wolf Season.

Q&A with Helen Benedict.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Honey"

Victor Lodato is a playwright and the author of the novels Edgar and Lucy and Mathilda Savitch, winner of the PEN USA Award for Fiction. The recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and The National Endowment for the Arts, his stories and essays regularly appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, Granta, and elsewhere. His novels and plays have been translated into eighteen languages.

Lodato applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Honey, and reported the following:

At 82, Honey has returned to New Jersey, after living for nearly fifty years in Los Angeles. For most of her life she’s wanted nothing to do with her mob family, but now, in her twilight years, she feels compelled to reckon with her violent past. Back in her hometown, she rekindles a romance with a childhood friend, Dominic Sparra. On page 69, we find Honey, not long after Dominic’s death, retreating into her closet—a large walk-in where, lately, she’s been spending more and more time.

From page 69:

The nice thing about the closet was that it was absolutely quiet. And since it was enormous, she’d been able to fit a lounge chair in there, along with a footstool, a reading lamp, a small table. It was very cozy, and the smell was always calming: the peat of leather shoes, the fresh milk of clean cotton, the deep green swell of cedar, not to mention the phantoms of old perfume trapped in wool or silk.

From the footstool, Honey retrieved a book she’d recently purchased, a feministic potboiler about women in prison. She settled herself in the chair, but after reading for less than a minute, she stopped, stared, breathed. The breathing took some effort.

At the funeral parlor she’d made light of her position, assuming that at her age she’d be a pro when it came to grief (so much experience!). But now the thought of Nicky collapsed her. He was, she knew, the last romance of her life. Selfishly, she was mourning that as well.

While it was true that Honey had always done just fine on her own, it would be dishonest to suggest that she didn’t adore being in love. Over the years she’d had so many wonderful affairs. Her sadness about Nicky was like a flare, lighting up all her other romances, both major and minor.

The boy in the tweed suit who’d taken her into the hills above campus. Another boy, a biology major, who made his own wine out of rhubarb. And during a summer at home, there’d been Pio Fini, briefly. Many boys, briefly. Then, in her thirties, the curly-headed cherub at the Self-Realization Center, who chanted during intercourse. In New York, the skinny stockbroker naked in black socks; the Polish swimmer with the girlish bottom. California had brought treasures, too. The cat-eyed actor in Laurel Canyon, twelve years her junior. Most of her lovers, of course, had been older—though no one more than Mr. Hal, who’d had thirty-four years on her, and with whom she’d stayed the longest, well over a decade.

“But who was your great love?” Lara sometimes asked, as if life were a novel. The question always annoyed Honey. Why must she decide? They were all great loves, in one way or another. Apparently some gals looked down on such a view—either that, or they felt sorry for Honey.

It’s tricky to say whether page 69 passes the test. What’s slightly misleading is the deep internality of this particular passage. While such interior monologues happen throughout the book, they’re not the norm; the novel is chock-full of action and dialogue and in-the-moment scenes. I’m a former playwright, and my time in the theater has influenced how I work as a novelist. I recall my very first editor saying that she thought playwrights made good novelists because “they know something has to happen.”

Also, this page might lead you to believe that the engine of this book is one of reminiscence. While Honey’s past is an important part of the novel—and we do get several glimpses of that time—most of the book happens in the present. The older Honey becomes tangled up, once again, with her mob family; she also gets deeply involved with a neighbor, a young woman in an abusive relationship.

The last thing I’ll say about how this page doesn’t quite communicate the spirit of the novel is that this passage is more wistful than much of the book. Here, we don’t get Honey’s wit, her humor, her grit, nor do we get an accurate sense of the high-stakes melodrama of the story—which at times made me want to call this book an opera, rather than a novel.

Where page 69 passes the test is that it sets up a few things that are very important to how the story unfolds. Honey’s closet is the location of a pivotal scene in the book—the climax, really—where the past and the present collide in a moment of shocking catharsis. Also, this page, in which Honey muses on her romantic affairs, hints at the idea of the book as a love story—which it is, in many ways. Of course, this passage seems to suggest that Honey’s love story is over—when, in fact, the most unexpected romance of her life is yet to come.

Visit Victor Lodato's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mathilda Savitch.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hart Island"

Gary Zebrun lives in Providence, Rhode Island. His first novel, Someone You Know, was a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award. Of his second novel, Only the Lonely, Kirkus wrote, “[this] ruminative novel captivates through the complexity and vulnerability of its characters and the excellence of its prose, polished to a luminous transparency.” He is the recipient of Yaddo, MacDowell, and Breadloaf fellowships and has published work in the New York Times, the New Republic, Iowa Review, American Scholar, Sewanee, The Believer, The Common, and elsewhere.

Zebrun applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Hart Island, and reported the following:

From page 69:

“Bad juju,” Jesús says. “Gold Arches dude dead is bad juju.”

Even Hemins and Booker shake their heads. “What kind of parent does that?” Hemins asks.

“Stupid or perverted,” Booker says.

Franklin and Al untie the ropes and shout up to Sal that all the lines are unhitched. Booker remains under the canvas cover with Hemins and the crew. In the wheelhouse, Sal switches on the navigation to help him through the haze.

Zookie turns to Jesús. “Did you hear about the tsunami?”

“Wha that, Japanese fish? I don’t eat it raw.”

“Shit, Jesús. You ain’t that dumb. It’s the big one. A tidal wave,” Franklin says.

“Somewhere in the South Pacific. It swept away a whole island,” Al says.

Jason says, “It could happen here.”

“Wha?” Jesús asks.

“A lot of death,” Jason says.

“Shit, we don’t need mo boxes,” Jesús says.

A hard rain starts, striking the tarp so insistently that the crew is quiet the rest of the way. When they dock at Hart Island, the downpour has eased to a drizzle and the fog has pretty much lifted. A cold easterly pinprick spray off the Sound strafes their faces.

“Not going to get much better than this,” Booker shouts up to Sal. “Supposed to come down hard off and on all day.” Turning to Hemins and the crew, he says, “Let’s get these coffins in the ground.”

“You the boss,” Jesús says, trying to put a hint of mojo back in his voice.

Jesús and Zookie carry a coffin, Beatrice Shepard 022407. “What kind of name is Beatrice?” Zookie asks.

“A beauty,” Jesús says. “She light. I bet she black, she sings like Summer Walker.”

“Who’s she?”

“Ain’t sayin’. She on Spotify. When you get out, you find Summer. Man, she all sugar.”

Al hears them talking and says, “Shit, Shepard isn’t a black name.”

How surprised I was when I came upon Page 69! While it doesn’t represent the key conflicts in the novel, nor are its characters the major ones, it does remind me of how much fun I had imagining the burial crew of Hart Island, five Rikers' inmates, and their reaction to burying the indigent, unclaimed and unknown in New York City’s potter’s field. The scenes where they interact with one another and react to the task of caring for the dead in their final moments engaged me; I was able to imagine how these “outcasts” would identify with the dead, with curiosity, respect, and sometimes humor. The Gold Arches dude in the first sentence refers to a coffin marked “Ronald McDonald 042406,” which they had just loaded onto the ferry before heading off to Hart Island. There are numerous scenes throughout the novel that portray these five men who leave the hellhole of Rikers Island prison for the day and find a kind of solace in the work of being gravediggers and witnesses to lives that would have been completely forgotten in their final moments if it weren’t for these Rikers’ angels.

The protagonist of the novel is Sal Cusumano, the ferryboat captain, who hauls the crew and coffins to Hart Island. In its essence, I think, Hart Island is a novel about two families: Sal’s family on Staten Island that includes mafia ties; his adopted brother who became his lover; his brother, a dirty NYC homicide detective; and his mother who’s going deeper and deeper into dementia. The second family is what Sal finds at New York City’s potter’s field: the island itself and its long history, the Rikers burial crew and its two DOC keepers, and especially the dead, new and old, buried there on Long Island Sound.

Visit Gary Zebrun's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers"

Samuel Burr is a TV producer who has worked on popular factual shows including the BAFTA-nominated Secret Life of 4-Year-Olds. Burr's writing was selected for Penguin's WriteNow scheme and in 2021 he graduated from the Faber Academy. He previously studied at Westminster Film School.

Burr applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers, and reported the following:

“They say puzzling is good for the old noggin,” the driver declared. “Stops you going doolally when you’re old.”

On page 69 of The Fellowship of Puzzlemakers, two best friends meet for the first time. But, as we uncover later in the book, ‘all best friends were strangers once’. In this scene, set in 1980, Pip Allsbrook (the revered crossword compiler from The Times) has hailed a taxi on Westminster Bridge in London. The driver behind the wheel, unusually in those days, is a woman. Nancy Stone isn’t like Pip. She lives a relatively secluded life with her overbearing mother in the East End and is the secretary of a fan club for a classic TV lothario she’s not ashamed to say she has the hots for. “What I wouldn’t give for a night with that man,” she declares, halfway down the page. And yet, these two women, while on the surface appear very different, have something quite extraordinary in common. They’re both exceptionally bright and are both operating in male worlds. Pip has fought hard to build her reputation as the nation’s most revered (even feared) crossword setter in the old-fashioned broadsheet press. And dear Nancy faces constant misogyny on the roads as she whips around the city in her black cab. “You wanna look where you’re pointing that thing,” a disgruntled male motorist shouts at her through his window when she cuts him off. “It’s not a shopping trolly.”

Not only do we touch on some of the key themes of the book on this page – the allure of puzzles, the feminist experience – we also witness a meeting of minds and the beginning of one of the most important, if unlikely, friendships in the book. Ultimately . . . this is a book about the greatest puzzle of all – finding our place in the world. I hope readers are encouraged to keep reading beyond the 69th page…!

Visit Samuel Burr's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The World Entire"

Jo Perry earned a Ph.D. in English, taught college literature and writing, produced and wrote episodic television, and has published articles, book reviews, and poetry. In 2019, Perry was the first female writer invited to speak at the venerable Men of Mystery Event. Her short story, "The Kick The Bucket Tour" made the Distinguished Mystery Stories of 2018 list in The Best Mystery Stories.

Perry lives in Los Angeles with her husband, novelist Thomas Perry.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The World Entire, and reported the following:

On page 69 of The World Entire, Ascher Lieb–protagonist, narrator of the novel, orphan, student of mortuary-science, and reformed liar is being led through the back corridors of a mortuary. A mortuary technician friend of Ascher’s boyfriend, Isaac, leads her to the room in which Ascher will spend the next six to eight hours performing shemira–the Jewish ritual of watching over the dead–in this instance––the body of the woman Ascher and Isaac found murdered the day before.

Ascher arrives at the mortuary unsettled and unsure. As a former Jewish burial society volunteer, she’s bathed and prepared the dead for burial, but Ascher has never shared a huge chunk of one-on-one time with a dead person. And she and Isaac had an ugly argument: Isaac is sure the bloody dog they found next to the ravaged woman killed her.

Ascher is sure that the dog is innocent. Now the officious woman leading Ascher through the mortuary is behaving more like a rival than the casual friend Isaac said she was. Are Isaac and this woman closer than he told Ascher?

The woman gestures at two doors with “Biohazard” and “Keep These Doors Closed At All Times” signs screwed into them at the hallway’s end as if she is about to tell me something important about them––then she elbows the wall-panel.

One of the doors gasps open to another hallway.

“I should have mentioned that the restroom is in the back where you came in. The plumbing’s old, so make sure not to flush any tampons or menstrual products.”

Is she joking? Or do I give off a menstrual-product-flusher vibe?

… I follow her past the door to the lounge/kitchen and three more doors, and she speaks again.

“Use of electronics is forbidden when you’re with the decedent––but I’m sure you know that. Just make sure your phone is turned off before you enter, and don’t leave the memorial candle burning if you step out––even for a minute. It’s a fire hazard. And don’t forget to sign in and sign out when you leave. Okay?”

“…Blow out the candle before I leave to do some tampon and menstrual product-flushing. I think I’ll be able to keep all this straight.”

“And make sure to remember that the door on the left is yours––” Isaac’s acquaintance is already walking away, her sharp elbow raised and aimed at the touchless control panel that will free her from me––“and the one on the right is the morgue.”

Things that matter intersect on page 69, which is a sort of precipice for Ascher: Facing the murdered woman alone begins Ascher’s search for a human murderer and her efforts to save the dog, may reveal that Ascher’s relationship with Isaac is beyond repair, and will demonstrate if Ascher has what it takes to accomplish all the above alone.

Visit Jo Perry's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Jo Perry & Lola and Lucy.

The Page 69 Test: Dead is Better.

The Page 69 Test: Dead is Best.

The Page 69 Test: Dead Is Good.

The Page 69 Test: Dead is Beautiful.

The Page 69 Test: Pure.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bunyan and Henry; Or, the Beautiful Destiny"

Mark Cecil is an author, journalist and host of The Thoughtful Bro show, for which he conducts author interviews with an eclectic roster of award winning and bestselling writers. He has written for LitHub, Writer’s Digest, Cognoscenti, The Millions, Reuters, and Embark Literary Journal, among other publications. He is Head of Strategy for A Mighty Blaze and he has taught writing at Grub Street and The Writers Loft.

Cecil applied the Page 69 Test to his debut novel, Bunyan and Henry; Or, the Beautiful Destiny, and reported the following:

I’d never heard of the Page 69 Test till you brought it to my attention, but I love the idea of it—the notion that the part will contain the whole in its microcosm. In the case of my book, the test just happens to work phenomenally well.

In my novel, Bunyan and Henry; Or, The Beautiful Destiny, Paul Bunyan has not become a lumberjack yet. Instead, he is stuck in a miserable life in a mining hamlet called Lump Town. His life is prosaic, brutal and nasty. Long ago, when he was a child, he always heard stories about a magical figure called a Chilali, a mythic being who helps guide a person along his or her “Twisty Path” to the “Beautiful Destiny,” a kind of higher, more authentic kind of life. But as an adult, Bunyan has dismissed his childhood dreams and idealism, and decided that Chilalis aren’t real. He has grown too cynical to believe in such a thing as the “Beautiful Destiny.”

However, when his wife grows ill and his life has begun to fall apart, one day an actual Chilali appears to him. At first, Bunyan is afraid of the idea of following the Twisty Path of the Chilali. It seems dangerously naïve. He thinks he’s going crazy. But on page 69 of my book, he has a change of heart. He seeks out the Chilali in the woods, and on this very page, he decides to begin to follow the Twisty Path.

Suddenly, he heard a voice.

“So, you have decided to embrace your true gift?”

The voice of the Chilali came from behind and above him, cool and ironic as it had been the day before.

“The straight path has failed,” said Bunyan. “But I cannot do this alone.”

To find the Chilali, Bunyan has climbed an enormous, petrified tree. Lump Town itself is covered in ash and soot—a kind of protocapitalist hellscape. But up here in the tree, for the first time in years, Bunyan finds fresh fruit growing. This passage on page 69 not only shows the fantastical setting of the book, but also demonstrates the rewards of beginning to chase the Beautiful Destiny. Now that he has sought out the Chilali, his life has become renewed.

A smell soon struck Bunyan’s nose. A strange smell. A delectable smell.

“What is that?” Bunyan eagerly looked about, his mouth watering.

Moments later Bunyan saw, growing from a crack in the branch, something he had not seen in years: soft, fresh, green, living . . . life. It appeared to be a vine of grapes.

They were strange-looking grapes—small, withered, hard. But they were growing nonetheless, fighting for life here in the smallest of crevices.

He knelt and took one in his hand. A tiny, perfect green sphere. He placed it in his mouth and pressed his teeth down upon it. He felt a cool eruption of juice, followed by overwhelming sweetness. For years, what had he eaten? Crumbly bread, smoked and salted meats, beans out of the tin. He found another, this one misshapen like an eggplant. He ate. More juice. It was ecstasy.

In the following pages, Bunyan will leave Lump Town for good and set out on his grand adventure. But the pivot point of the story happens to occur on page 69, when he finally says yes to the Beautiful Destiny.

Visit Mark Cecil's website.

My Book, The Movie: Bunyan and Henry; Or, the Beautiful Destiny.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mal Goes to War"

Edward Ashton is the author of the novels Mal Goes to War, Antimatter Blues, Mickey7 (now a motion picture directed by Bong Joon-ho and starring Robert Pattinson), Three Days in April, and The End of Ordinary. He lives in upstate New York in a cabin in the woods (not that Cabin in the Woods) with his wife, a nine pound killing machine named Maggie, and the world’s only purebred ratrantula, where he writes—mostly fiction, occasionally fact—under the watchful eyes of a giant woodpecker and a rotating cast of barred owls. In his free time, he enjoys cancer research, teaching quantum physics to sullen graduate students, and whittling.

Ashton applied the Page 69 Test to Mal Goes to War and reported the following:

The Page 69 Test is a little tough to apply to Mal Goes to War, for the simple reason that page 69 is the end of a chapter, and only contains a couple short paragraphs of text. So, I’m going to cheat just a bit and include a couple of paragraphs from page 68 to round things out:

With that accomplished, Mal has the opportunity to explore the sensory systems that are now available to him. First, he checks for a direct link to infospace. He doesn’t expect to find one, so he’s not particularly disappointed that none exists. That’s a minor issue. He’s in an aircraft now rather than a human skull, and he’s confident he can find a functioning tower before he runs out of power and crashes. The only actual data connection he finds is through a low-power directional transmitter. Presumably, this connects the drone to whoever had been controlling it prior to Mal’s arrival. He’s also receiving a steady stream of input from an array of onboard sensors, including a visible-wavelength camera mounted on his underside.

He taps that feed, and finds that he’s orbiting directly over a rusty white pickup truck. The bed is full of armed men. As he watches, it comes to a halt.

It comes to a halt in front of a house that he quickly recognizes as the Andreous’ home.

Mrs. Andreou is leaning out of an upstairs window, frantically waving a white pillowcase over her head.

“Kayleigh?” Mal sends. “Are you awake? If you are, please tell Asher that you are about to have visitors.”

There’s no response, of course. Kayleigh can only transmit using her mouth-hole. There’s no way for her to let him know whether she’s heard him or not. Someone is leaning out from the passenger-side window of the pickup, gesturing with one arm toward Mrs. Andreou. He turns his head then, appears to speak to the men in the back. Mal checks to see whether his new body carries any armaments, and is pleasantly surprised to see that in fact there is an air-to-surface missile strapped under each wing.

He is less pleasantly surprised to learn that, in his space-making, he’s deleted the control systems needed to launch them.

“Kayleigh?” Mal sends again. “If you can hear me, you may want to pick up your bat.”

If you were looking for a single page in this book to tell the reader what they’d be in for if they picked it up, you could do a lot worse than this. From this page we can glean that our protagonist isn’t human, that he’s an entity that moves from host to host, not much caring whether he’s currently inhabiting a human body or an armed drone or a network-enabled toaster. We also learn that he has friends, and that they’re trapped in the middle of an a war. They’re obviously in a bad spot at the moment, which also describes the bulk of the book.

The thing we’re missing from this section, though, is the rest of the cast. Mal Goes to War is science fiction, but like most of my work, it’s character-driven science fiction. The main thread of this book follows the efforts of a mismatched band of refugees as they try to find some modicum of safety in the midst of chaos, and much of the fun comes from the ways in which they bounce off of one another. Kayleigh is a genetically modified woman in the body of a child. Asher is Kayleigh’s prisoner-turned-maybe-friend. Pullman is a rich doofus with a set of cerebral implants that turn out to be a perfect vacation home for Mal after Pullman’s dog steals and eats the severed head that Mal had been hanging around in previously. They’re not anyone’s idea of the A-team, but when the world is coming apart at the seams, you take whatever friends you can find.

At the end of the day, I’d probably prefer a page with a bit more dialogue and maybe a laugh or two to this one. This is a funny book, and I’m not sure this page really conveys that. You don’t have to take my word for it, though—you can read the rest of the book and find out for yourself.

Visit Edward Ashton's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mickey7.

Q&A with Edward Ashton.

The Page 69 Test: Antimatter Blues.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Killing on the Hill"

Robert Dugoni is a critically acclaimed New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post and #1 Amazon bestselling author, reaching over 9 million readers worldwide. He is best known for his Tracy Crosswhite police series set in Seattle. He is also the author of the Charles Jenkins espionage series, the David Sloane legal thriller series, and several stand-alone novels including The 7th Canon, Damage Control, The World Played Chess, and Her Deadly Game. His novel The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell received Suspense Magazine’s 2018 Book of the Year, and Dugoni’s narration won an AudioFile Earphones Award. The Washington Post named his nonfiction exposé The Cyanide Canary a Best Book of the Year.

Dugoni applied the Page 69 Test to his new thriller, A Killing on the Hill, and reported the following:

Page 69 opens with the line, “Well, I didn’t know what to do. I mean, the guy’s bleeding to death on the floor. So I took out my handkerchief and tried to stop the bleeding, but then Millier says, ‘Leave him be and get the hell out of my club.’”

The speaker is a witness, a boxer who went to Miller’s Pom Pom Club with the murdered boxer, Frankie Ray. He’s recounting what happened to Chief Detective Ernie Blunt. The lines reflect the overall book because this witness soon changes his story and it becomes clear to William Shoemacher, the reporter from the Daily Star newspaper that everyone in Seattle can be bought for a price, and no one can be trusted.

Visit Robert Dugoni's website and Facebook page.

The Page 69 Test: Wrongful Death.

The Page 69 Test: Bodily Harm.

My Book, The Movie: Bodily Harm.

The Page 69 Test: Murder One.

My Book, The Movie: Murder One.

My Book, The Movie: The Eighth Sister.

The Page 69 Test: The Eighth Sister.

My Book, The Movie: A Cold Trail.

The Page 69 Test: A Cold Trail.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Agent.

My Book, The Movie: The Last Agent.

Q&A with Robert Dugoni.

The Page 69 Test: In Her Tracks.

Writers Read: Robert Dugoni.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Not Quite Enlightened Sleuth"

Verlin Darrow is currently a psychotherapist who lives with his psychotherapist wife in the woods near the Monterey Bay in northern California. They diagnose each other as necessary. Darrow is a former professional volleyball player (in Italy), unsuccessful country-western singer/songwriter, import store owner, and assistant guru in a small, benign spiritual organization. Before bowing to the need for higher education, a much younger Darrow ran a punch press in a sheetmetal factory, drove a taxi, worked as a night janitor, shoveled asphalt on a road crew, and installed wood flooring. He missed being blown up by Mt. St. Helens by ten minutes, survived the 1985 Mexico City earthquake (8 on the Richter scale), and (so far) has successfully weathered his own internal disasters.

Darrow applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Not Quite Enlightened Sleuth, and reported the following:

From page 69:

I’d decided on a frontal assault once I’d seen Dennis’s smug expression.

He paused and assembled his features into what passed for humility—with most people, that is. His eyes reminded me of a hound I’d known—a conniving creature who was always stealing his sibling’s food.

“I loved your mother very much, and God knows why, she loved me back. I would never harm a hair on her head. Truly.”

“I’d like to believe you, but what you said back in your hospital room was alarming,” I told him.

“Look,” he began, leaning forward, “I can see you’re sharp, and you know I put up a front sometimes. It’s hard for me to let people in—let them see who I really am. But I’m leveling with you here. I did not kill your mother.”

“But you think someone else did? Is that what you were saying yesterday?”

He leaned back again and crossed his arms. “I said I’m taking care of that, and I will.”

“You think there was foul play?”

“I do.” He kept his face studiously neutral.

“And you think you know who it was?” I asked.

“I do.”

“Why not just go to the police—or tell me, at least?” I asked. “Don’t I have a right to know?”

“It’s complicated. I need you to trust me.”

“Dennis, you’re the person I trust least in the world right now. Everything about you seems to be inauthentic.”

He wasn’t offended. In fact, he didn’t seem to care at all.

My page 69 definitely passes the test. Although several basic elements aren’t revealed—the narrator is a former Buddhist nun, for example—the interplay between this insightful protagonist trying to get the truth out of non-truth tellers is typical. Throughout my mystery, it’s hard for Ivy to know who she can trust, who isn’t who they purport to be, and who is a possible suspect. Her Buddhist precepts both help and hinder her in her search for the truth.

In this scene, Ivy is trying to brace the stepfather she’s never met after her mother may have been murdered. Her bi-polar sister certainly has thought so from the outset, and now it appears she is right. Unfortunately, shortly after page 69, Dennis is murdered as well and his background as a smuggler comes to light, complicating the case.

Visit Verlin Darrow's website.

Writers Read: Verlin Darrow (May 2023).

My Book, The Movie: Murder for Liar.

The Page 69 Test: Murder for Liar.

--Marshal Zeringue

"An Inconvenient Wife"

Karen E. Olson is the winner of the Sara Ann Freed Memorial Award and a Shamus Award finalist. She is the author of the Annie Seymour mysteries, the Tattoo Shop mysteries, and the Black Hat thrillers. Olson was a longtime editor, both in newspapers and at Yale. She lives in North Haven, Connecticut.

Olson applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, An Inconvenient Wife, and reported the following:

Page 69 is from one of the chapters from the point of view of Anna, Hank Tudor’s fourth wife:

She could hear Hank and Tom talking on the back porch below Lizzie’s room, but she couldn’t make out what they were saying. It was best she didn’t know, anyway. There were a lot of things it was best not knowing. That’s why she never asked Caitlyn about Alex Culpepper.

Anna closed the drawer and picked up the laundry basket. Lizzie was leaning against the railing at the top of the stairs, her red hair escaping from the French braid to form little tendrils around her face. Anna was struck again by how solemn her expression always was. The girl rarely smiled, although when she did, it lit up the whole room.

“Daddy’s leaving.”

Anna felt a surge of maternal love and reached around to hug her.

“He’ll be back,” she whispered.

“I know.” Lizzie pulled away and stood up straighter, her head high. She was a tough one, but sadly it was because she had to be. “He says you and Joan will keep us safe.”

Anna nodded. “That’s right. We won’t let anything happen to you or Teddy.”

Lizzie cocked her head and narrowed her eyes. “But it’s really Will and Murph who are protecting all of us, right?”

Leave it to Lizzie to know what was what. “That’s right.”

“They couldn’t protect that woman, though, could they? So how safe are we, really?”

This page is a good snapshot of Anna’s character. “There were a lot of things it was best not knowing” is a theme throughout the book, indicating the secrets tucked away among Hank’s relationships and how Anna knows she has to keep those secrets close to the vest. This page also shows the deep relationship between Anna and Hank’s daughter Lizzie, and Lizzie’s feelings about her father, who is mostly absent from her life.

The sense of foreboding at the end of this passage adds to the suspense that weaves itself throughout the novel.

Visit Karen E. Olson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue