"Her Prodigal Husband"

Becky Masterman is the author of Maternal Instinct and the Brigid Quinn series, including Her Prodigal Husband.

While working as a forensic science acquisitions editor, Masterman got to meet (and publish) some of the most famous people in that profession, and the idea for Brigid Quinn was born. The four novels in this series—Rage Against the Dying, Fear the Darkness, A Twist Of The Knife, and We Were Killers Once—feature this FBI special agent who only in her retirement is finally getting married, making friends, owning Pugs, and trying to fit into the civilian world she always sought to protect for others, all while keeping her book club from finding out she can kill people with her bare hands. Rage Against the Dying was a finalist for the Edgar Awards and the CWA Gold Dagger, as well as the Macavity, Barry, ITW and Anthony awards.

Masterman applied the Page 69 Test to Her Prodigal Husband and reported the following:

The author Alice Einstein had an early shot at fame. Nearly two decades later, faced with declining sales, and ghosted by her agent Frank Schaeffer, she will conceive of a story stemming from the true one about a baby who died while in her sister Liesl's care. In Alice's story, Liesl kills the baby. Alice fights the temptation to write this--for a while. After all, Alice loves her tender-hearted sister. It's just that her lust for creative success is at odds with that love.

This is also a fiction about how the ex-FBI agent Brigid Quinn comes to be a character in Alice's story, a la crime dramas that focus as much on the chronicler as on the detective. In a metafictional sense, Alice creates the character of Brigid Quinn and becomes the author of all the books in her series.

On page 69 Alice has tracked down and cornered her agent at the Tucson Book Festival, forcing a humiliating meeting to find out whether a current idea is saleable. Not good enough, she's told.

Frank fingered the watch on his hand, as if trying to read the time by touch. Then his eyes scanned the cafeteria and stopped at the wall behind me and I just knew there was a clock there. "Well, you know, babe, I think this this needs a little more pizzazz, know what I mean? Something to keep the pages turning. Listen, I really need to hear Noam Chomsky's presentation and it's all the way across the mall. Let me call you when I get back to the City."

I was depressed all the way home, so low I'd have to reach up to tie my sneakers.

It could be argued that in a well-written book every single page reveals something about the core dilemma. Certainly page 69 of Her Prodigal Husband does so. With the backdrop of all the surrounding characters surmounting their very real problems, the driving force of Her Prodigal Husband lies in these questions about the stories we invent: to what extent are the real lives of the people we love creative fodder? What are the results of manipulating others' lives for the sake of a plot? Do we make stories or do our stories make us?

Visit Becky Masterman's website.

My Book, The Movie: Rage Against the Dying.

The Page 69 Test: Rage Against the Dying.

My Book, The Movie: Fear the Darkness.

The Page 69 Test: Fear the Darkness.

My Book, The Movie: A Twist of the Knife.

My Book, The Movie: We Were Killers Once.

The Page 69 Test: We Were Killers Once.

--Marshal Zeringue