"The Beauty of the End"

Lauren Stienstra is an American novelist who enjoys writing about the intersection of duty, science, and humanity. She believes that fiction can encourage readers to re-think their roles, responsibilities, and relationships in our own present world.

Originally from the San Francisco Bay Area, Stienstra now lives, works, and writes around Washington, D.C. She holds advanced degrees in science and public policy from the George Washington and Johns Hopkins universities, and trained in creative writing at UCLA.

Stienstra applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Beauty of the End, and reported the following:

From page 69:

Three birds, one stone. By joining the Mendelia, I’d get to leave Hawley. I’d get to stay with my sister. I’d surrender my ovaries and everyone would stop bothering me about kids.

It was almost too good to be true.

“There’s just one last thing,” I said. “What are we going to tell Mom?”

Albeit brief, this page offers a great summary of The Beauty of the End up to page 69, and also hints at the forthcoming tension. A reader skipping to this page will be left with several pressing questions—one of which is particularly chilling. What is the Mendelia? (It should carry an ominous undertone.) Why does the narrator want to leave Hawley? And most perplexingly, why does she think surrendering her ovaries is a good thing? The answers to these three questions are central to my main character’s motivation, and they are all tidily encapsulated here.

As far as the unfolding drama, it’s clear the main character is speaking to someone—but who? Based on the weight of internal dialogue, the reader will likely (and correctly) suspect that the conversational partner is someone significant. Then comes the reveal: they share a mother. Even more intriguingly, they are conspiring to keep something from her. One of these siblings has an something to hide—a major plot point in the book.

From this short excerpt, the reader will probably surmise that there is something sinister afoot. While the opening chapters gradually build this atmosphere, this passage distills it quite effectively. The only missing piece is a direct reference to the precipitating crisis—the discovery of the species-ending genetic flaw.

Visit Lauren Stienstra's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Beauty of the End.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Immortal Woman"

Su Chang is a Chinese-Canadian writer. Born and raised in Shanghai, she is the daughter of a former (reluctant) Red Guard leader. Her fiction has been recognized in Prairie Fire’s Short Fiction Contest, the Canadian Authors’ Association (Toronto) National Writing Contest, the ILS/Fence Fiction Contest, the Masters Review’s Novel Excerpt Contest, the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival Fiction Contest, among others.

Chang applied the Page 69 Test to her debut novel, The Immortal Woman, and reported the following:

Page 69 of my book is distinctively different from most other pages in that it recounts, in a satirical and brisk manner, a series of factual occurrences at the end of the Cultural Revolution (the downfall of the Gang of Four and Mao’s handpicked heir, and the rise of President Deng Xiaoping). This page might have been the most non-fictional of the entire novel! As such, I’m afraid the Page 69 Test doesn’t quite apply to my book. The page serves as a bridge between two narrative scenes. I’m much more interested in the human story than recounting history. Browsing this page alone wouldn’t tell the reader much about the book, other than the fact that part of it is set in the 1970s China. However, I think history buffs would find it intriguing. And even for those who didn’t pick up the book for its history, I hope I’ve found an entertaining and humorous way to compress a period of complex history into one single page and to set the stage for the ensuing human drama.

Learn more about the book and author at Su Chang's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Immortal Woman.

--Marshal Zeringue

"I Am the Swarm"

Hayley Chewins is the critically acclaimed author of The Turnaway Girls and The Sisters of Straygarden Place. She grew up in Cape Town, and now lives in Johannesburg, South Africa, with her husband and daughter. She is the singer and songwriter for the alt-pop band Eight Thousand Birds.

Chewins applied the Page 69 Test to her YA debut, I Am the Swarm, and reported the following:

Page 69 of I Am the Swarm contains the following poem:

“Did something happen? With Mamma?”

Dad shakes his head.

Meaning: Having you looked around lately?

Meaning: Where have you been these past few months?

Meaning: Don’t ask me to tell you. Don’t ask me to say it out loud.

If you were browsing in a bookshop and you opened my book to page 69, you’d get a good idea of the style of the prose. The spareness of Nell’s voice is evident here, and so is the use of white space. Quite a lot to get from 39 words!

What page 69 leaves out, though, is the strange, irrational magic that the book contains, which is a huge part of the story. So I’d say the test is partly successful, but the reader might be surprised a few pages later when Nell’s mother is suddenly seventeen again, or when Nell herself wakes up after a nightmare to find her bedroom floor sticky with black beetles.

What page 69 does really well, though, is give the reader of sense of all the silence in the book. I Am the Swarm is, in part, a story about all the things we can’t say to one another, and page 69 is a good example of that theme coming through.

Visit Hayley Chewins's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bitterfrost"

Bryan Gruley is the Edgar-nominated author of six novels – Purgatory Bay, Bleak Harbor, the Starvation Lake Trilogy, and his most recent, Bitterfrost - and one award-winning work of nonfiction. A lifelong journalist, he shared in The Wall Street Journal's Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He lives in northern lower Michigan with his wife, Pamela, where he can be found playing hockey, singing in his band, or spending time with his children and grandchildren.

Gruley applied the Page 69 Test to Bitterfrost and reported the following:

Page 69 of Bitterfrost finds us in the home of the protagonist, Jimmy Baker, as he’s being visited by police detective Garth Klimmek. Some hours earlier, police had found the body of a man beaten to death. Klimmek is here because the house was visible from the scene of the crime; he thought the occupant might have seen something. The detective had actually stopped by earlier, when Jimmy wasn’t home, and saw some things that made him even more curious. As Klimmek is asking Jimmy about the night before, Bitterfrost police officer Paul Sylvester arrives with some important information.

The page is a nice microcosm of the novel because it embodies a central tension: Jimmy’s violent past and his difficulty remembering what happened the night before, when he came upon the now-dead man and his friend at a local bar. Klimmek treads lightly, asking simple questions in a friendly way, playing the proverbial good cop. At the same time, the detective has in the past day researched Jimmy’s troubling history: “In (Klimmek’s) line of work, he’d encountered plenty of people … capable of inflicting lethal violence using nothing but their hands. But he had to wonder how this hometown hero, the second child in a seemingly normal Bitterfrost family, had become such a brute.”

When Klimmek steps outside to speak with Officer Paul Sylvester, he hears—though Jimmy does not—that an anonymous caller who heard about the killing on the news has alerted police that “a couple of Detroit guys were raising hell at the Lost Loon last night, might have run into trouble.” By now the reader knows Jimmy was at the Loon, where he ran into two Detroit guys and decided afterward that he might not go directly home. Combined with Jimmy’s faulty memory, the scene heightens the reader’s suspicions of Jimmy’s culpability. The scene hints at the questions that will run through the reader’s mind throughout Bitterfrost: Could Jimmy have done it? Did Jimmy do it? Why doesn’t he remember anything that might acquit him? Is he simply lying?

Answers are provided a couple of hundred pages later.

Learn more about the book and author at Bryan Gruley's website.

The Page 69 Test: Starvation Lake.

The Page 69 Test: The Hanging Tree.

The Page 69 Test: Bleak Harbor.

The Page 69 Test: Purgatory Bay.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Falls to Pieces"

Douglas Corleone is the international bestselling author of Gone Cold, Payoff, and Robert Ludlum’s The Janson Equation, as well as the acclaimed Kevin Corvelli novels, the Simon Fisk international thrillers, and the stand-alone courtroom drama The Rough Cut. Corleone’s debut novel, One Man’s Paradise, won the 2009 Minotaur Books/Mystery Writers of America First Crime Novel Award and was a finalist for the 2011 Shamus Award for Best First Novel. A former New York City criminal defense attorney, Corleone now resides in Honolulu, where he is currently at work on his next novel.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Falls to Pieces, and reported the following:

In the ARC (Advance Reader’s Copy) of Falls to Pieces, page 69 contains only five lines since it ends a chapter. I thought I’d be writing about how the novel fails the test, but when I read the page, I realized it passes.

The scene takes place in a lava tube (a natural cave formed by lava) just off the hiking trail at a Maui National Park, where Kati’s fiancé Eddie has gone missing. Kati and her fiancé’s law partner Noah are searching for a missing walking stick, which may hold the key to Eddie’s disappearance.

The page brings a satisfying conclusion to the suspense built up in the chapter, which would give a new reader a fair idea of the story. These few lines also raise a startling new question, urging the reader to ignore the clock and read one more chapter.

(Actually, the next chapter is in Kati’s daughter Zoe’s point of view, so readers are just going to have to read two. Tomorrow morning, we’ll all just need to grab an extra cup of coffee.)

Learn more about the book and author at Douglas Corleone's website.

The Page 69 Test: Good as Gone.

My Book, The Movie: Payoff.

The Page 69 Test: Gone Cold.

My Book, The Movie: Gone Cold.

Writers Read: Douglas Corleone (August 2015).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne"

Ron Currie is the author of four novels and one collection of short stories. He has won the New York Public Library’s Young Lions Award, the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and the Pushcart Prize. His books have been translated into fifteen languages, and his short fiction and nonfiction have received recognition in Best American anthologies. As a screenwriter he worked most recently on the Apple TV+ series Extrapolations and has developed projects with AMC Studios, Amblin Television, and ITV America. He lives in Portland, Maine and teaches in the University of Southern Maine Stonecoast MFA program.

Currie applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne, and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Savage, Noble Death of Babs Dionne introduces readers to the character of The Man, a ghoul in the tradition of Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men. The Man is on his way to Waterville, Maine, where he intends to confront the novel's heroine, Babs Dionne, and take away the drug business she's been running for the last thirty years:

Not, understand, that The Man was in any hurry. In point of fact, he never hurried, even when going extremely fast. He did not experience urgency the way normal people experienced urgency. His pulse rarely rose above sixty (forty if he was sitting still). He'd never had a need for antiperspirant. Not once in his life had he suffered the stress-induced cortisol hangover that characterized modern life for most people. Perhaps this was genetic. Whatever the reason, his autonomic nervous system remained dark and dormant in any situation when the average person's would be screaming five alarms, pulling every hormonal and cardiovascular lever to prepare the body for mortal threat real or imagined. It just didn't register for him, and never had. He could recognize stress or peril intellectually, but his body refused to respond. Not only did this explain the fact that he was capable of only one mood--namely, cheerful impassiveness--but it also made The Man 100 percent indifferent to the fear and pain and hopes of other people.

This is an excellent representation of the whole of the novel: spooky, funny in a cockeyed kind of way, and also menacing and deadly serious all at once.

Unfortunately page 69 doesn't cover The Man's backstory, which follows immediately after and shows us how he came to understand his calling as a cartel enforcer. Oddly enough, he was in cosmetology school at the time, training to be a hairdresser, and he experienced something, while learning the fine art of straight-shaving, that clued him in to the fact that he was well-suited for the kind of work he does when we meet him.

Learn more about the book and author at Ron Currie's website.

The Page 69 Test: God Is Dead.

My Book, The Movie: God Is Dead.

The Page 69 Test: Everything Matters!.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Ends of Things"

Sandra Chwialkowska is a television writer and producer who splits her time between Los Angeles and Toronto. Most recently, she served as writer and co–executive producer on the Golden Globe–nominated ABC series Alaska Daily, created by Oscar-winning writer Tom McCarthy and starring two-time Oscar winner Hilary Swank. Chwialkowska holds a BA in literature from Yale.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Ends of Things, her first novel, and reported the following:

On page 69 of the paperback, Laura describes her former best friend Chloe’s curated social media presence, and this touches on one of my novel’s key themes—appearance vs reality. The novel is concerned with how things look vs how things really are, what we think we are supposed to want from life vs what we really want. Social media allows Chloe to present an image of herself that is inauthentic, and this foments in Laura a lot of anxiety. When Laura learns that Diana, the solo female traveler that she becomes obsessed with, has no social media presence at all, it underscores Laura’s internal struggle—the yearning to abide by social norms in order to belong (like Chloe) vs the desire to step outside of those norms and be unconstrained and free (like Diana).

Visit Sandra Chwialkowska's website.

Q&A with Sandra Chwialkowska.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Mailman"

Andrew Welsh-Huggins, a son of the Finger Lakes and now longtime Ohio resident, is the Shamus, Derringer, and International Thriller Writers-award nominated author of 10 mystery novels and two nonfiction books, and editor of a short-story anthology

His latest novel, The Mailman, is a Library Journal pick of the month. Publishers Weekly said of the thriller: “With full-throttle pacing from start to finish, this will have Jack Reacher fans hoping Carter is back in action soon.”

Welsh-Huggins applied the Page 69 Test to The Mailman and reported the following:

For The Mailman, the Page 69 Test locates the narrative in media res with suggestions of secrets being kept and hints of drama to come.

The top of the page finds my protagonist, freelance courier Mercury Carter, quizzing Glenn Vaughn, a passenger in Carter’s Chevy Suburban, about Glenn’s work for Xeneconn, an Indianapolis pharmaceutical company. Xeneconn has been in the news lately as it works on medication to treat addiction. Carter is struck by Glenn’s reluctance bordering on hostility to discuss his work.

Glenn interrupts Carter and asks him to clarify something Glenn overheard Carter say in a phone conversation a minute earlier about Chicago. Carter confirms the city is their destination and Glenn appears to suffer a panic attack. Glenn reveals that his teenage daughter, Abby, attends a private boarding school in Chicago.

“What if they…?” Glenn says as the page ends.

The backdrop for this conversation took place less than two hours earlier when Carter interrupted a home invasion at the suburban Indianapolis house that Glenn, an attorney, shares with his wife, Rachel Stanfield, also an attorney. In the seconds before Carter rang the doorbell with a delivery for Rachel, a four-person team led by an uncompromising brute called Finn was on the cusp of torturing Glenn and Rachel to pry information from them about a woman Rachel’s firm is in litigation with.

As Rachel begs for their lives, telling Finn she’s divulged all the information she has, Glenn blurts out that he has millions of dollars he can give the men. The revelation shocks Rachel even in the depths of her fear.

Carter has never missed a delivery and will do just about anything to keep that streak alive, a motto he unleashes when he realizes what’s going on inside Rachel and Glenn’s house, to the detriment of Finn and his gang. Despite Carter’s best efforts, however, Finn and company escape with Rachel as a hostage and head to Chicago. Unbeknownst to them, Carter—with Glenn in tow—is in close pursuit.

The plot of The Mailman is transparent from the start: can Carter rescue Rachel in time? Page 69 reveals layers of that dilemma and raises questions about how well Rachel and Glenn know each other, with their lives and their daughter’s life at stake.

Visit Andrew Welsh-Huggins's website.

My Book, The Movie: An Empty Grave.

Q&A with Andrew Welsh-Huggins.

The Page 69 Test: An Empty Grave.

Writers Read: Andrew Welsh-Huggins (April 2023).

My Book, The Movie: The End of the Road.

The Page 69 Test: The End of the Road.

Writers Read: Andrew Welsh-Huggins (November 2024).

My Book, The Movie: Sick to Death.

The Page 69 Test: Sick to Death.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Map to Paradise"

Susan Meissner is a USA Today bestselling novelist with more than a million books in readers’ hands and in eighteen languages. Her critically acclaimed and award-winning works of historical fiction have been named to numerous lists including Publishers Weekly’s annual roster of 100 best books, Library Reads Top Picks, Real Simple's annual tally of best books, Booklist’s Top Ten, Book of the Month, and Amazon Editors’ Pick. Her newest title is A Map to Paradise, a novel about belonging, friendship, and finding one’s way home, and is set in California during the early and scary years of the Cold War. Susan lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and yellow Lab, Winston.

Meissner applied the Page 69 Test to A Map to Paradise and came up with following:

From page 69:

“For heaven’s sake,” Melanie said in an exasperated voice. “Elwood is not some kind of madman who can’t handle seeing a stranger! He just doesn’t go outside. And it’s not a disturbance to ask someone if there’s anything you can do for them.”

So on the fourth afternoon, and while June was sitting on the couch with pages of Elwood’s current screenplay to proofread, Eva did attempt to make contact from the hall side of his bedroom door, behind which she heard the sound of a radio playing and the whirring of an oscillating fan. She tapped on the door as lightly as she could and said softly, “Mr. Blankenship? Is there anything I can get for you? Mr. Blankenship?”

There’d been no answer.

With a trembling hand and a whispered prayer she’d tried the doorknob. It would not turn.

In this little snippet from A Map to Paradise, Melanie Cole, a blacklisted actress hiding out in 1956 Malibu, is worried about the agoraphobic screenwriter who lives next door. She hasn’t seen Elwood in a while and she’s worried that June Blankenship, his sister-in-law and live-in caregiver, isn’t being truthful when Melanie asks about him. Melanie has tasked her housekeeper, an Eastern European immigrant named Eva Kruse who lost everything and everyone in WW2, to find out if Elwood is okay. Eva has the means to do it as Melanie has loaned her housekeeper to June for a little while June recovers from a strained back. We see in this scene on page 69 that Eva is unable to do what Melanie has directed her to do—which is make sure Elwood is all right.

This scene is not exactly pivotal to the story’s overall takeaway, but it is absolutely essential to understanding what will compel these three women to become allies to each other. They have nothing in common except the loss or imminent loss of all that defines them, all that makes them feel safe and secure and believing they are right where they belong.

This is a story about three women all facing some kind of displacement. Melanie the actress has been caught up in the Red Scare that was rampant in Hollywood in the 1950s and she’s been ousted from the only career she’s ever wanted. Eva the housekeeper is one of the eleven million Displaced Persons made homeless by World War 2 and she has also lied on her immigration papers. She is pretending to be Polish, when in fact she was born in Russia. And June stands to lose her home, her livelihood and the man she secretly loves if he dies. And he’s not well.

It's a story that explores what a person will do to get back what was taken from them or prevent it from being taken in the first place. It’s about imagining there could be a map that will lead you back to what you once had.

If only it were that easy.

Visit Susan Meissner's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Susan Meissner & Bella.

My Book, The Movie: Stars Over Sunset Boulevard.

My Book, The Movie: A Bridge Across the Ocean.

The Page 69 Test: A Bridge Across the Ocean.

The Page 69 Test: The Last Year of the War.

The Page 69 Test: Only the Beautiful.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Dollhouse Academy"

Margarita Montimore is the author of The Dollhouse Academy, Asleep from Day, Acts of Violet, and Oona Out of Order, a USA Today bestseller and Good Morning America Book Club pick.

After receiving a BFA in Creative Writing from Emerson College, she worked for over a decade in publishing and social media before focusing on the writing dream full-time. Born in Soviet Ukraine and raised in Brooklyn, she currently lives in New Jersey with her husband and dog.

Montimore applied the Page 69 Test to The Dollhouse Academy and reported the following:

From page 69:

“Everyone keeps warning me about how I shouldn’t get used to things the way they are now, how much harder it’s going to get,” I say. “I’m not scared off that easily.”

“I’m not trying to scare you off, only prepare you. A lot of people think they can handle it but break down after the first few weeks. The commitment it takes, the toll it takes . . . You don’t know until you live through it.”

The excerpt above is from a conversation between Ramona, the main character, and Mason, who’s worked at the Dollhouse Academy for a number of years. It takes place when Ramona is still a new trainee and still dazzled by the opportunity to study performing arts at an exclusive, secretive boarding school that has produced some of the biggest stars in showbiz in recent years. While Ramona is hardworking and determined to succeed, she also has no idea of the darker forces at play in the Dollhouse Academy.

This passage hints at something unsettling on the fringes, and that undercurrent of dark uncertainty runs throughout the story. The exchange between Ramona and Mason also conveys some of the story’s central themes, particularly those of ambition and the cost of making your dreams a reality. Ramona and her best friend Grace enter the Dollhouse Academy unaware of its unorthodox methods and sinister secrets. The two women have no way of being prepared for what will actually be demanded of them and how their friendship will be tested as a result. As they discover what’s really happening behind the scenes, they’ll need to decide how much they’re willing to sacrifice in their pursuit of stardom.

While page 69 of The Dollhouse Academy gives readers a taste of the overall story, it doesn’t necessarily convey that the book evolves into something stranger and a bit more surreal than a more conventional dark academia novel.

Visit Margarita Montimore's website.

The Page 69 Test: Oona Out of Order.

The Page 69 Test: Acts of Violet.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Everybody Says It's Everything"

Xhenet Aliu’s novel, Brass, was awarded the biennial Townsend Prize in 2020, the 2018 Georgia Author of the Year First Novel Prize, was a Barnes & Noble “Discover Great New Writers” selection, and was long-listed for the 2018 Center for Fiction First Book Prize. Numerous media outlets, including Entertainment Weekly, The San Francisco Chronicle, Real Simple, and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, named Brass a 2018 best book of the year. Previously, her debut story collection, Domesticated Wild Things, and Other Stories won the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction. Aliu’s writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Glimmer Train, Hobart, LitHub, Buzzfeed, and elsewhere, and she has received fellowships from the Bread Loaf and Sewanee Writers’ Conferences, a grant from the Elizabeth George Foundation, and a fellowship from the Djerassi Resident Artists Program, among other awards. She teaches Creative Writing at the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Aliu applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Everybody Says It's Everything, and reported the following:

Ah, on page 69, Drita spends a lonely Saturday night doing a little internet sleuthing:

The hits weren’t related to her brother, but some other Petrit DiMeo. They must have been, because the guy they referred to was some kind of a guerrilla soldier, somebody who’d signed up for something called the Kosovo Liberation Army. The articles were essentially duplicates of each other, reprints from a single wire service, but Drita clicked through them all, not because she thought she’d found her brother but because each tap killed a few more seconds, and it was novel to think of a parallel Petrit DiMeo out there in the world, one with convictions and a sense of purpose beyond scoring his next pack of Kools. Kosovo had been popping up in the news lately, but Drita assumed it was mostly because the news had to come up with something to fill the airwaves after Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, not because anyone actually knew or cared what was going on in a part of the world that not even the Peace Corps got involved with.

But there was a human interest angle for the news to pick up on: a bunch of exiles and immigrant kids in the U.S. had volunteered to fight for the independence of their homeland, or their parents’ homeland, a place they maybe visited once or twice or, for some, never at all. One of the pieces had a photo to accompany it, and strangely, the photo showed a guy who looked a lot like her brother, if she could imagine her brother clean-shaven and wearing camouflage. And stranger still, the caption called this doppelgänger Petrit DiMeo, which at first amused Drita, and then, after she clicked on the photo to expand it in her screen, made her swat her empty wineglass to the floor.

This was no doppelgänger. That was Drita’s brother, Petrit DiMeo, staring back at her in black and white, his thick hair buzzed the way he wore it for the three months he played Pop Warner football in middle school.

Not to toot my own horn here, because it’s entirely accidental, but page 69 is a pretty darn perfect distillation of the main conflicts and themes of the book: the relationship between Drita and her estranged twin brother Petrit, a troubled young man who’s suddenly found a cause; and the twins’ Albanian identities, which, as adoptees raised outside of the culture in a working-class Connecticut city, they experience very differently. Beyond that, with the references to Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial and the Kosovo War, it clearly situates the reader in a specific time–early 1999, to be precise. What you can’t specifically tell from this page is that Drita isn’t Google-stalking here, because Google was barely a blip on the digital radar in 1999. Nope, she relied on some of the free AOL dial-up hours every sentient human received via CD-ROM in the late 90s. One of the most fun parts of writing this book for me was re-experiencing AOL’s homepages and chatrooms, which I did through a combination of the Wayback Machine and other cached screenshots, along with my own shoddy memory. Truthfully, I wasn’t an early adopter of AOL and never really went deep into Chat life, even as a lonely teenager who should’ve jumped at the chance to engage with other lonely teenagers (and the occasional, or probably frequent, middle-age man pretending to be a teenager). Drita was my chance at a late-90s AOL do-over.

Visit Xhenet Aliu's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Banker"

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 Banker, and reported the following:

If a curious person, say in a bookstore picked up The Banker and randomly turned to page 69 to see if the writing grabbed them here's what they'd get. Vietnam veteran, former Special Forces Sergeant, former Boston Cop, Andy Roark is in Amesbury Massachusetts surveilling a bank in the spring of 1986. Weeks earlier he was hired to figure out which of three suspects had been embezzling funds from it. Roark quit the case because it was boring. Then the bank was robbed and one of the suspects was murdered. The timing is too coincidental and Roark decides he's back on the case, even if the Bank's President doesn't want to hire him back. Page 69 finds Roark parked outside the bank as one of the two remaining embezzlement suspects leaves for lunch. He follows her into a deli where he has a discussion with her.

Page 69 is a good snapshot of what the book is about. Andy Roark is doing classic PI stuff, tailing and bracing a suspect. There is enough of the backstory on page 69 to give the reader some idea what the book is about. There's certainly enough description to hold a reader's attention. There is enough inner monologue for the reader, if they are new to the series to get a sense if they like the protagonist, don't call him a hero, Andy Roark.

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.

Writers Read: Peter Colt (June 2022).

My Book, The Movie: The Ambassador.

The Page 69 Test: The Ambassador.

The Page 69 Test: The Judge.

My Book, The Movie: The Judge.

Writers Read: Peter Colt (May 2024).

Writers Read: Peter Colt.

My Book, The Movie: The Banker.

--Marshal Zeringue

"At the Island's Edge"

C. I. Jerez, who has a blend of Irish, Puerto Rican, and Cuban parentage, grew up near El Paso’s Mexican border experiencing a true cultural amalgamation. After graduating from the University of Texas at El Paso, she commissioned as a signal officer in the US Army and rose to the rank of major before transitioning out of the military. She holds an MBA from Webster University and a doctorate in international business from Liberty University. When not writing, she serves as cofounder and vice president for Ashire Technologies & Services Inc., a cybersecurity firm specializing in securing federal information systems. She lives in central Florida.

Jerez applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, At the Island's Edge, and reported the following:

From page 69:

“Salud,” Dolores and Eli reply in unison as she pulls out the seat beside me.

“Can I offer you something to eat?” Eli asks, placing a menu in front of us. “A little food in your belly might be a good idea before this one over here,” he says, pointing in my direction, “ends up three sheets to the wind.”

I give him my best give-me-a-break face, and Dolores smiles politely, but she doesn’t understand Eli’s southern colloquialisms.

The rest of the page describes the connection between Dolores and Eli through a fellow soldier who was from Puerto Rico and passed away.

I think page 69 provides readers with an excellent example of how I wanted to take two unique cultures that were, in theory, very different and weave them together in a natural and harmonious manner. This book takes a unique approach to a Latino-based setting by showing the reader the similarities within the unique American culture. This Page 69 Test also worked well for my book because you get a scene with three very important people in the novel: the protagonist, who is already showing her affinity for drinking away her troubles, her cousin, who has a penchant for drawing attention, and the outsider from South Carolina who has set up his new life on the island. The novel weaves these three characters together throughout the story and their lives do collide in ways we didn’t expect. I believe page 69 does a great job of foreshadowing those connections but also providing a firsthand account of the cultural intricacies in this book and how a traditional American who has never been to Puerto Rico may see or experience the island, and how some of the islanders may react to them. I believe this page also shows the welcoming spirit of the Puerto Rican people, while highlighting the sweetness and often laid-back lifestyle they tend to enjoy on “island time.”

Visit C.I. Jerez's website.

My Book, The Movie: At the Island's Edge.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Animal Instinct"

Amy Shearn is the award-winning author of the critically acclaimed novels Dear Edna Sloane, Unseen City, The Mermaid of Brooklyn, and How Far is the Ocean From Here. She has worked as an editor for Medium, and her work has appeared in the New York Times Modern Love column, Slate, Real Simple, Martha Stewart Living, Oprah, Coastal Living, Poets & Writers, Literary Hub, Catapult, The Millions, The Rumpus, and many other publications. Shearn has an MFA from the University of Minnesota, and currently lives in Brooklyn with her two children.

Shearn applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Animal Instinct, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Animal Instinct is, interestingly, not that representative of the book as a whole. It finds us on a cursed family vacation, the protagonist Rachel and her kids and her ex-husband trying to hang on to a tradition of their old life, even post-divorce -- unsurprisingly it's a fraught week at the shore. The page does contain the line "What an obvious mistake she had made," which feels emblematic of Rachel's married life. Most of the book concerns her adventures and explorations immediately following the divorce, but this scene is an important part of it all, as it shows the reader what she's trying to move so decisively away from. An early reader of the book just texted me today about this scene that it's painful to read, which I took as a compliment.

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.

The Page 69 Test: Dear Edna Sloane.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Bane Witch"

Ava Morgyn grew up falling in love with all the wrong characters in all the wrong stories, then studied English Writing & Rhetoric at St. Edward’s University. She is a lover of witchcraft, tarot, and powerful women with bad reputations, and she currently resides in Houston with her family, surrounded by antiques and dog hair. When not at her laptop spinning darkly hypnotic tales, she writes for her blog on child loss, hunts for vintage treasures, and reads the darkest books she can find. She is the author of YA novels Resurrection Girls and The Salt in Our Blood, and paranormal women's fiction The Witches of Bone Hill.

Morgyn applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Bane Witch, and reported the following:

From page 69:

Her eyes slide to my booted foot. “You’re in trouble,” she says plainly. She looks concerned but not surprised.

“Not anymore,” I tell her. Henry will never find me up here, miles from the comforts of urban living. I felt unsure until I arrived, but being tucked into the forest like a chick beneath the wing of a hen, so much unadulterated nature pooling for miles and miles—I can’t imagine it. And by now he’s found my note, knows I’m dead. Even without a body—it could have easily washed into the Atlantic—he won’t know to look at all if I did my job right. I permit myself a modicum of relief.

Myrtle leans back into a leather armchair, watching me eat. Beside her, a stack of old books glow arsenic green. “It’s been a long time, Piers,” she says quietly. “Why now?”

“I don’t go by that anymore.” My eyes meet hers. I’m not ready to talk about Henry yet, about why I came, how I got here.

The Page 69 Test gives readers a solid grasp of what The Bane Witch is about and its primary characters, Piers and Myrtle Corbin. On this page, readers see Piers and Myrtle interacting for the first time, as Piers finally allows herself to relax a little bit after her escape from her abusive husband, Henry. Just prior to the portion I quoted, Piers recalls an example of Henry’s toxic and controlling behavior, which gives readers a condensed glimpse into her tortuous marriage and past, making the following dialogue, quoted above, more chilling and understandable. In this scene, there is a sense of Piers’ desperation and all she’s risked to flee her home and marriage, which is important to understand as the groundwork is laid for who she really is as the main character—a bane witch—and everything that implies. Likewise, there is a sense of her great aunt Myrtle’s maternal instinct toward her, as she prepares Piers a sandwich earlier on the page, and her inherent wisdom as she cautiously notes and asks about the circumstances of Piers’ sudden and unexpected arrival.

While I wouldn’t say this singular page sums up the entirety of the novel, it does capture many of the complexities of this story—Henry’s abuse, Piers’ motivation and survival instincts, Myrtle’s role as Piers’ mentor. And while readers don’t meet Henry face to face on this particular page, they do get a disturbing introduction to who he is as a husband and a man, and the role he will go on to play in Piers’ story.

I do hope readers will find this peek into The Bane Witch tantalizing enough to consider reading well beyond page 69. It is a darkly fantastical tale that touches on the deeper, much more real issues of violence against women.

Visit Ava Morgyn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Just Want You Here"

Meredith Turits is a writer and an editor.

She specializes in business, economics, sports, and literature (but she’s written about and edited nearly everything). Currently, she is the editorial director, features at Front Office Sports.

Turits is the former editor of business features at BBC.com. Prior, she was a founding editor of Bustle, where she launched and ran books coverage, and has held other senior strategic editorial roles at both startup and legacy media companies.

The newly released Just Want You Here is her debut novel.

Turits is a magna cum laude graduate of Tufts University, and attended the Yale Writer’s Workshop for fiction. She lives and writes in Connecticut, and has more useless sports knowledge in her brain than you can possibly imagine.

Turits applied the Page 69 Test to Just Want You Here and reported the following:

From page 69:

Ari feels trampled by his frigidity. He’s been distant all week, but she’s chalked it up to how busy he is, how there’s no way he could possibly talk about them here. Yet there’s something about the staccato of his voice that makes her feel like he’s closed the book on them, even if he’d barely cracked it at all.

In this passage, my main character Ari has a conversation with her boss, Wells, after they've slept together once. He has a conversation with her at the office that feels too normal for her after what they've done, and her brain is scrambled by it. She doesn't know if their relationship will go forward or not.

The underlying emotion in this paragraph is about desire and confusion, looking for signs and signals to know what's right and what's next. In that regard, it's a good litmus test for the overall tenor of the book, which is all about the emotional journey of forging your path after the one you counted on swerves. In another sense, however, Ari and Wells's affair ramps up quickly and this is the only point at which she questions whether something will happen, which doesn't reflect their relationship throughout the book. But overall, I'd say this does a good job of reflecting the book and its prose.

In general, Just Want You Here has plenty of plot, including twists and turns, but it's overall a book about relationships and desire and the emotional journey people go on to navigate them. There's a lot of interiority from the four main characters, and I really wanted that to shine as you navigate growth and regression with them. Passages like this, even though they're just moments in time, are indicative of what I hoped to do on the page, which was bring readers as close to my characters as possible.

Visit Meredith Turits's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Boy"

Nicole (N.D.) Galland’s novels span the spectrum from historical (The Fool’s Tale, Revenge of the Rose, Crossed, Godiva) to Shakespearean (I, Iago) to contemporary rom-com (Stepdog, On The Same Page) to speculative fiction (New York Times bestselling The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. co-written with Neal Stephenson). She has a MFA in Creative Writing from University College Dublin, and loves teaching workshops on world creation.

She has also worked as a stage director, dramaturg, and X-wing fighter pilot.

Galland applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Boy, and reported the following:

Page 69 starts with the tail end of a conversation between the 19-year-old actor Sander Cooke (one of my two protagonists) and his mentor in Shakespeare’s theatre company. The story’s other protagonist is Joan, Sander’s best friend from childhood, who wishes to become a scientist (or natural philosopher, as they were then called). Sander, who’s played nothing but female roles his whole career, is anxious about life and livelihood after his apprenticeship ends in a few months, when he’ll no longer be considered fit for female roles. His mentor, John Heminges, disapproves of Sander’s desire to seek out aristocratic patrons.

“Can you fault me if I do?” demanded Sander. With his fingers he caressed the air, showing off their length and gracefulness. “I am a delight to the eye and the ear. Charming and winsome. An attentive listener. I can speak at length on some few topics – not so many as Joan – and what I speak of is of interest to lords and ladies. I bring with me a whiff of celebrity. ‘Tis the sole capital I have – I’ve no money or jewels or land or brawn, and no other marketable competencies. So please do not begrudge me investing in my future with the qualities I have.”

“Remarkable how a boy with not a penny to his name is so eager to sell himself into England’s most fickle market,” sniffed Hemings. He rose with obvious annoyance and walked back into the tiring house.

The remainder of the page is Sander’s strategizing about which lords to woe for patronage, as he spends a free afternoon roving his London neighborhood, at loose ends, avoiding his many admirers.

The Page 69 Test does a startlingly good job of showing one-half of the story’s dynamic duo. It perfectly summarizes Sander’s personal crisis, appearance, and status in the world. And even though he breaks the “show, don’t tell” rule, it’s appropriate here, because he’s obsessively preoccupied with how to sell himself to others.

And while Joan doesn’t even appear, this brief excerpt still tells us a lot about her: with no other context, we hear of her intelligence and curiosity about the world, in a way that reveals Sander is close to her and respects her; he sees her as his superior in one regard, despite his urgent need to up-talk himself. All of this information is both accurate, and vital to the story. I hadn’t realized I’d crammed all that into a single paragraph! And how remarkable the paragraph happens to be on page 69!

What we learn about them shows us what’s important to each, and in that sense, the excerpt hints at where the plot might go… but in fact, the plot goes to extreme places the reader would not intuit or even guess.

Visit Nicole Galland's website, Facebook page, and Threads page.

Coffee with a Canine: Nicole Galland & Leuco.

The Page 69 Test: Stepdog.

My Book, The Movie: Stepdog.

Writers Read: Nicole Galland (August 2015).

My Book, The Movie: Boy.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Broken Fields"

Marcie R. Rendon is an enrolled member of the White Earth Nation, author, playwright, poet, and freelance writer. Also a community arts activist, Rendon supports other native artists / writers / creators to pursue their art, and is a speaker for colleges and community groups on Native issues, leadership, writing.

She is an award-winning author of a fresh new murder mystery series, and also has an extensive body of fiction and nonfiction works.

Rendon applied the Page 69 Test to Broken Fields, her newest Cash Blackbear Mystery, and reported the following:

Not only does Broken Fields start with a dead man and young child mute with shock, but by page 69 Cash is also trying to track down Sheriff Wheaton, who she knows drove to Twin Valley to check out a bank robbery.

At the bank Cash is in conversation with a female bank clerk and a barely-of-legal-age male bank clerk. Both were victims of the robbery and both are good eyewitnesses, able to describe the robbers. “It was two young men, didn’t look like hoodlums at all. Dressed like ‘going to town’. Tall, skinny guy and a shorter one. Both wore handkerchiefs over their mouths. After we handed over the money they ran out and jumped in the car. Driven by a young woman. All I could tell was she was wearing a yellow dress, yellow blouse maybe.”

That particular scene foretells Wheaton’s misconception and misfortune a few pages on.

The last time either bank teller saw Wheaton he was headed southwest of Twin Valley.

In typical Cash fashion, Cash leaves the bank and stands by her Ranchero, observing the near-empty streets of the small town while lighting a cigarette and inhaling, exhaling. Then she gets in the Ranchero and drives west on the trail of Wheaton.

In the Cash Blackbear series, Wheaton has been Cash’s rescuer and mentor. He is the one benign person the troubled nineteen year old can count on. Page 69 doesn’t describe the worry she feels. In typical Cash fashion she keeps her feelings under wrap and key. It isn’t until page 75 that her inner turmoil erupts.

Visit Marcie R. Rendon's website.

The Page 69 Test: Sinister Graves.

Q&A with Marcie R. Rendon.

My Book, The Movie: Sinister Graves.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Butterfly Trap"

Before turning to a life of crime (fiction), Boston Globe-bestselling author Clea Simon was a journalist. A native of New York, she came to Massachusetts to attend Harvard University and never left. The author of three nonfiction books and 32 mysteries, most recently the psychological suspense The Butterfly Trap, her books alternate between cozies (usually featuring cats) and darker psychological suspense, like the Massachusetts Center for the Book “must reads” Hold Me Down and World Enough. She lives with her husband, the writer Jon S. Garelick (another Boston Globe alum), and their cat Thisbe in Somerville, Massachusetts.

Simon applied the Page 69 Test to The Butterfly Trap and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Butterfly Trap captures Greg and Anya in a rare domestic moment. Anya is attempting to cook dinner and failing miserably.

“I think the tomatoes were a bad idea,” she says, looking into the pot. “Now I keep stirring it and trying to think about what to add. I don’t think it’s edible. Want to try?”

He does, and when she sees his reaction, she starts laughing and he joins in.

“How about we make reservations instead?” is his response (acknowledging that he’s repeating an old joke) and – after dumping the disaster down the disposal – she goes off to change clothes, “her eyes bright with anticipation.” It’s a lovely moment between a young couple trying to make a home, a life, together.

If only more of Greg and Anya’s life were like this scene! While page 69 captures one side of their relationship, it misses so much else that is going on, often covertly or not spoken about, between the two, especially once they move in together.

Still, there would be no tension, no drama in writing about a mismatched couple that was always at odds. Why would such a couple even be together? Page 69 here may describe a rare and atypical moment of domestic harmony for Greg and Anya. But showing what they had – or could have had – only ups the ante on what they have to lose.

Visit Clea Simon's website.

The Page 69 Test: To Conjure a Killer.

The Page 69 Test: Bad Boy Beat.

Writers Read: Clea Simon (May 2024).

Q&A with Clea Simon.

My Book, The Movie: The Butterfly Trap.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Fourth Consort"

Edward Ashton is the author of the novels The Fourth Consort, 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 The Fourth Consort and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Fourth Consort finds our protagonist, Dalton Greaves, contemplating a job offer he's just received from the representatives of Unity, an interstellar confederation dedicated to finding budding sentient life wherever it arises, and guiding it away from self-destruction and onto the path of peace and enlightenment.

That's what they told him, anyway. A quick internet search reveals that the few stories out there from people who have signed on with Unity and returned don't seem to have much to do with enlightenment. Seems like the humans Unity takes are mostly being used for either scut work or something that sounds suspiciously like plunder:

A man from the Netherlands claimed to have spent ten years doing equipment maintenance on an ammie ship without ever seeing the surface of a planet. A Korean woman said she'd been taken to an administrative center somewhere on a world with no moon and a fat red sun that never budged from its place on the southern horizon, where she provided cultural context to ammie researchers wading through ten thousand years of human literature looking for something worth replicating. Someone going by the handle Anger Man claimed to have participated in what sounded like a research study into the mechanics of human reproduction.

That one didn't sound so bad.

A reader browsing to page 69 would actually get a reasonably good idea of the setup of the book. The Fourth Consort is a twist on the old trope of humanity joining a benevolent galactic civilization. In particular, it wonders how that might play out if the civilization actually isn't actually all the benevolent--more than that, what if there is a benevolent civilization out there, but we've inadvertently signed on with a criminal gang? Because this page lays out Dalton's thinking as he considers Unity's offer, it gives a fair overview of the premise.

What we don't get at all from this page, however, is a feel for the characters, the tone, or any idea of the details of the plot. The Fourth Consort is heavy on snappy dialogue and interesting, conflicted characters, with a heavy dose of dark comedy. Because this page is really all about filling in the background, we don't get any of that here. We also don't learn much of anything about Dalton himself, and much of the focus of the book is on his journey up from a very grim place in small town West Virginia to a slightly less grim place in the cosmos.

Bottom line for me is that while you could do worse than this page if you were looking to determine what this book is all about, you could definitely do better. I might suggest pages 114-115 as better representatives. Bob and Randall are the real unsung heroes here.

Visit Edward Ashton's website.

The Page 69 Test: Mickey7.

Q&A with Edward Ashton.

The Page 69 Test: Antimatter Blues.

Writers Read: Edward Ashton (March 2023).

The Page 69 Test: Mal Goes to War.

Writers Read: Edward Ashton (April 2024).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Drowning Game"

Barbara Nickless is the Wall Street Journal and Amazon Charts bestselling author of Play of Shadows, Dark of Night, and At First Light in the Dr. Evan Wilding series, as well as the Sydney Rose Parnell series, which includes Blood on the Tracks, a Suspense Magazine Best of 2016 selection and winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence; Dead Stop, winner of the Colorado Book Award and nominee for the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence; Ambush; and Gone to Darkness. Her essays and short stories have appeared in Writer’s Digest and on Criminal Element, among other markets. She lives in Colorado, where she loves to cave, snowshoe, hike, and drink single malt Scotch―usually not at the same time.

Nickless applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, The Drowning Game, and reported the following:

In The Drowning Game, Nadia and Cassandra Brenner are the heirs to a prestigious yacht-building firm. Cass is in Singapore overseeing a build for a Chinese billionaire when she falls to her death from the 40th floor of one of the word’s most expensive hotels. In the novel, page 69 offers only a glimpse into the novel’s themes of betrayal, treachery, and family secrets. The page is focused on Nadia’s decision to look into her sister’s unexpected death—be it suicide, an accident, or murder. We get a few leads on this page as to where Nadia’s investigation might take her in Singapore: an astrologist Cass was apparently seeing (even though she didn’t believe in astrology or fortune telling), secretive behavior by Cass’s assistant, and an invitation to dinner from the man hired to handle security for the almost finished yacht. While this page offers only a small peek into the avenues Nadia will explore, she is haunted by her father’s advice, which will stay with her throughout the novel: “Trust no one."

Visit Barbara Nickless's website.

The Page 69 Test: At First Light.

Q&A with Barbara Nickless.

The Page 69 Test: Play of Shadows.

Writers Read: Barbara Nickless.

--Marshal Zeringue