"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