"The Myth Maker"

Alie Dumas-Heidt lives in the Puget Sound with her husband, adult kids, and two Goldendoodles – Astrid and Torvi. Growing up she wanted to be a detective and a writer and spent a few years working as a police dispatcher. Now, working is writing in her home office with the dogs at her feet. When she’s not writing she enjoys being in the forest, creating glass art, yarn crafts, and watching baseball.

Dumas-Heidt applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Myth Maker, and shared the following:

Page 69 of The Myth Maker starts: “Every major news studio had caught wind of the latest suspicious death.” and goes on to recap the difficulty the lead detectives had gaining access to a scene that is already overcrowded once they arrive. The rest of the page is Detective Cassidy Cantwell and her partner Bryan Ramirez walking into a home that is now a murder scene, being greeted by the officers who were first on scene and making a quick assessment of differences between this scene and an earlier scene. Amazingly, the page offers no spoilers!

If someone was browsing through a bookshop or a library and flipped to page 69 of The Myth Maker I believe they’d have a pretty good idea of what type of story they were reading. They would meet the main character, Detective Cassidy Cantwell, and her partner, Bryan. I think they would get a feel for the setting and time period – modern day, city – and the pace of the characters because there is a bit of dialogue. There is mention of a chandelier our narrator thinks would fit better at Buckingham Palace, which I realize could make someone question what city we’re in. They would be at the start of a new murder scene, where there are no answers, only questions, and I think readers would want to know what was going on.

It’s an interesting test to jump into a random page and see if you could be pulled into a story. Looking over page 69 of The Myth Maker, I realized there’s plenty to give away what genre a reader picked up, but it gives little of the actual story away. You wouldn't know that our main character is new in her career as a detective. You wouldn't know about her connection to an early suspect, or that she's trying to balance her own failing two-year romance, and her family with her new career. A previous victim is mentioned without detail, and while the officers are at the general location of a murder, there’s no details revealed before the end of the page. It’s not even clear on that page who our main character is. If they hadn’t at least peeked at the jacket blurb, a reader wouldn’t even know our main character’s name! While Cassidy speaks and is spoken to on page 69, her name is not used at all, and that was not something I'd ever thought about before doing this test.

Visit Alie Dumas-Heidt's website.

Q&A with Alie Dumas-Heidt.

Writers Read: Alie Dumas-Heidt.

My Book, The Movie: The Myth Maker.

--Marshal Zeringue