"Hold Back the Dark"

Eileen Carr lives and writes in northern California. As Eileen Rendahl, she has written four chick-lit novels.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her debut romantic suspense novel Hold Back the Dark, and reported the following:

A middle of the night phone call from the Sacramento PD delivers a shock to clinical psychologist Aimee Gannon: her seventeen-year-old patient could be a suspect in a gruesome murder. Detective Josh Wolf needs Aimee’s help to decipher the clues behind a pattern of rectangles and circles drawn in blood at the crime scene.

Page 69 of Hold Back the Dark has the tail end of a scene from the point of view of the book’s heroine, Aimee Gannon, and the beginning of a scene from the point of view of the book’s hero, Josh Wolf.

Aimee’s scene ends with her saying good-bye to her client’s aunt and leaving the police station and, she thinks, walking away from the situation.

“Aimee walked past the glassed-in booth where the sergeant sat and out to the parking lot, feeling like she was leaving an awful lot of unfinished business behind.”

I think the scene sums up Aimee’s feelings about what’s happened so far in the book. She’s done what she can to help, but the system is going to shut her out and keep her from doing anything more. She walks out of the police station feeling uneasy.

Josh’s scene begins as he interrogates what could be the last person who saw the Aimee’s client before she became catatonic. He is frustrated in more ways than one.

“Josh rubbed his hand over his face, took a deep breath and counted to ten. Again. Another teenaged girl that he’d like to shake until her teeth rattled. Did this one have a hot shrink who could distract him, too? That would make it all into just the most perfect clusterfuck ever.”

Again, this certainly sums up Josh’s mindset at this point in the book.

If I picked up the book and read this page, I’d want to read more. I’d want to know about Aimee’s unfinished business and what Josh was going to learn about what happened the night of the murder. Since it even gives a hint at the romantic entanglements to come, I’d want to learn how that progresses as well.

Read an excerpt from Hold Back the Dark, and learn more about the book and author at Eileen Carr's website.

Watch the Hold Back the Dark video trailer.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Steel Remains"

Richard K. Morgan is the acclaimed author of Thirteen, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award, Woken Furies, Market Forces, Broken Angels, and Altered Carbon, a New York Times Notable Book that also won the Philip K. Dick Award.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Steel Remains, and reported the following:

Meet Ringil Eskiath (something you really wouldn't want to do in real life), retired and forgotten war hero, sexual degenerate (standard issue terminology in this world for gay) and sword wielding hard man non pareil. By the time we hit p. 69 of The Steel Remains, we have already met Ringil a couple of times, but this page (the beginning of Chapter 7 in the US hardback edition) frames him perhaps as well or better than anything else in the book:

"Ringil went home, bad-tempered and grit eyed with the krin"

A state of mind Ringil spends quite a lot of The Steel Remains inhabiting, in fact. "Krin", proper name krinzanz, is a nasty, speedy drug (think Crystal Meth) and a lot of the veterans of this war have developed a taste for it (though it's more likely Gil's taste came from his earlier misspent noble youth) and he uses it a lot. The bad temper, though, cannot be considered wholly chemically induced. Home, for Ringil Eskiath, is not a particularly good place to be.

The rest of p. 69 is largely devoted to a description of the upmarket Glades district of Ringil's home city Trelayne, sunk in pre-dawn gloom and providing:

"a.....palette for his mood - low lying river mist snagged through the tortured black silhouettes of the mangroves, high mansion windows like the lights of ships moored or run aground..........The pale unreal gleaming of the paved carriageway beneath his feet and others like it snaking away through the trees."

There's a slightly creepy, slightly unreal feel to this stuff which I like, and which foreshadows the haunted places Ringil will spend quite a lot of the latter parts of the novel surviving in. And the description (and p.69) finishes with the off-hand explanation:

"this might easily have been any given morning of his misspent youth"

Might have been, but is not. Ringil is older now (though not particularly wiser), paunchier and more weary, and while the book charts his return to some of the haunts and pre-occupations of his youth, what he discovers in the process will only drive him further and more bitterly still from the place he once called home. For Ringil Eskiath, there can be no homecoming, no redemption and no happy end. In fact, he'll be lucky if he walks away from it all in one breathing piece.

Enjoy.

Read an excerpt from The Steel Remains, and learn more about the book and author at Richard K. Morgan's website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mixed Blood"

Roger Smith is an accomplished screenwriter, director, and producer.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Mixed Blood, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Mixed Blood is about the least typical page in the book! My thriller is set in the South African port of Cape Town during a heat wave, with the mountains surrounding the city ablaze with bushfires. On Page 69, though, we flash back to snowbound Milwaukee where we learn why an American, Jack Burn, is hiding out in Cape Town with his pregnant wife and young son.

Burn, a security expert with a gambling habit, got blackmailed into a bank heist. The gang hits a vault at night and gets away with a couple of million. They’re making their getaway in downtown Milwaukee when a prowl car stops them. There’s a shootout and a cop and two of Burn’s accomplices are killed, and the third wounded.

Burn vaulted the seats. He shoved the dead guy out of the van, got in behind the wheel and took off. The cop was still shooting. Burn floored the van, fishtailing, fighting to get it under control. As he drifted into a corner Burn saw the strobing lights of the cop car in pursuit. A block later it hit ice and spun one-eighty before collecting a lamppost and disappearing from Burn’s mirror.

Burn ditched the vehicle in a side street, grabbed one of the bags of money from the rear and took off into the night, leaving the van and the dying kid.

Jack Burn, his wife and four-year-old son flee the US with the dollars, choosing picture-postcard Cape Town as a hideout. But Cape Town has a flipside: millions of people live out on the Cape Flats, a ghetto where the homicide rate is off the charts. One night two meth-heads from Flats break into Burn’s house in a plush neighborhood, ready to rape and pillage. Burn protects his family, but this incident of random violence sets him on a collision course with a rogue cop who loves killing almost as much as he loves Jesus Christ.

Read an excerpt from Mixed Blood, and learn more about the book and author at Roger Smith's website, Facebook page, and Crimespace page.

Watch Roger Smith's video introduction to Cape Town, the setting for Mixed Blood.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Posed for Murder"

Meredith Cole's short stories have appeared in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine and the anthology Murder New York Style.

She applied the Page 69 Test to Posed for Murder, winner of the St. Martin’s Press/Malice Domestic best traditional first mystery contest, and reported the following:

Posed for Murder is about a woman named Lydia McKenzie who takes murder recreation photographs. She researches historic cases of women’s whose deaths have gone unsolved, and in some cases their bodies were never identified. She convinces her friends to pose for her film noir style pictures. When Lydia finally achieves her dream of having a show in New York, she is horrified to discover that someone is killing her models just like her photographs. Lydia must figure out the identity of the killer—and stop him before he kills again.

On page 69, Lydia is examining her murdered friend’s calendar to see if she can find any clues to her death. Instead of focusing completely on the task, she gets frustrated by her friend Marie’s bad handwriting and sidetracked by photographs of Marie’s birthday party the year before. This is typical Lydia. She means to be the best sleuth possible, but finds visual images distracting. She is also personally involved with the death. Marie is her friend, and she feels somehow responsible since the murderer used her photograph as a blueprint for the killing.

Lydia, longing for happier times when her friend was still alive, is drawn deeper into the past. Nostalgically, she remembers everyone in her circle of artist friends getting along and being creative together. But in the photographs are some vital clues that will help her solve the mystery of Marie’s death, and will make Lydia ask herself if her memory of her friends and past events is at all accurate. In this way, p. 69 does give a good sense of the rest of the book, and hopefully will draw readers deeper into the story.

From page 69:

Marie’s party the previous year had been a blast. Marie had a gift for collecting creative friends, and then inspiring them to use their talents for her birthday. A designer friend decked out her apartment to resemble a giant red silk tent. It looked like it belonged more in the desert than in Brooklyn. A florist had covered every available surface with fragrant rose petals. A baker made dozens of cupcakes with portraits of Marie on them. Georgia Rae’s band had played, and although the place was packed with people, everyone danced the night away.

Her friend Marie was also a photographer, and was someone Lydia admired a lot. She did art photography and fashion photography, and was hired regularly by top fashion magazines. But Lydia keeps uncovering secrets from Marie’s life at every turn. She tries to cling to what she remembers about her friend, but has to wonder if she really knew Marie at all.

Learn more about the book and author at Meredith Cole's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Rose Variations"

Marisha Chamberlain is a novelist, playwright, poet and librettist. Her plays have been staged all over the world: in South Africa, Germany, Australia, Turkey, Britain and Canada as well as in the United States.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Rose Variations, her first novel, and reported the following:

On page 69 of my novel, The Rose Variations, protagonist Rose MacGregor is up in the night with her best friend, Ursula. Rose needs to talk. She’s just had an abortion and is walloped by the emotional aftereffects. But Ursula, an exhausted doctor in training, in spite of her deep bond with Rose, keeps falling asleep as Rose tries to talk to her.

Rose told her to snuggle down under the covers. She needed sleep. The story could wait.

“No. Tell me now.” Ursula got up and walked to one of the long windows and stood looking out at the hard winter sky. It was one of her most endearing traits—she could look away and yet concentrate all the warmth of her listening, and thus allow Rose to unwrap slowly whatever it was that needed telling.

Leaning against the window, however, Ursula gave a sudden jerk and started in again, mid-sentence about the triage, how blood had sprayed the team and she hadn't minded, how she, as leader, had shouted orders and they'd got the job done. She'd been good at it—really good, abso-fucking-lutely a performer. She turned and regarded Rose with puzzlement. “I'm a monster,” she said. “You had an abortion. Tell me.”

“I am.”

Ursula dug her knuckles into her forehead.

Ursula’s an apprentice healer, but she’s so carried away with her bloody initiation into the rites of healing, that she can’t hear her best friend’s woundedness. It’s a keenly miserable, unfunny moment in a novel that elsewhere has large measures of humor and joy. But in a way it’s representative of my deepest intentions as a novelist. I read and write fiction to find out the truth. And the truth often resides where pain is.

Read an excerpt from The Rose Variations, and learn more about the author and her work at Marisha Chamberlain's website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Cradle"

Patrick Somerville is the author of the story collection Trouble (Vintage, 2006), and his writing has appeared in One Story, Epoch and Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007. He lives with his wife in Chicago, and is currently the Blattner Visiting Professor of Creative Writing at Northwestern University.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Cradle, and reported the following:

It’s hard to argue that page 69 of The Cradle is representative of the novel—the page contains an unusual overload of dialogue, much of it coming from a character we barely know, and along with that, the whole scene takes place thirty (or forty, depending on your perspective) years before the book’s narrative present; this scene is therefore buried in the murky realm of flashback. Tangential at best? There’s more: Renee, who I would have to call a rather sober individual, seems to be completely out of her head on Quaaludes on this particular page. Hm. The drugs, and the party’s loud music, make this page all but nonsensical, actually.

Nothing I’ve described is normal for The Cradle. I promise you, it’s not a novel of inebriated conversations.

However, come to think of it, this page is absolutely representative of the book.

That’s because The Cradle, at its core, is about families, and as we all know, families are nonsensical. It’s about individual histories following people into their new families, no matter how they choose to cope with trauma: some people choose to conceal their pasts, some choose to forge new identities, some choose to become so strong that nothing, it seems, could ever hurt them. But if any worthwhile truth made it into the book, it’s this: you can’t eschew your past. Ever. Furthermore, you will hurt yourself by trying. You’ll also hurt the people you love.

Page 69 is a part of Renee’s past, and one she would rather forget. But it’s a very important memory, and its submersion has caused quite a lot of pain already: it’s the birth of love. It’s a mess of a conversation and a disastrous first-impression, but it’s the birth of love. It’s the beginning of a relationship that will cause her terrible pain, but…well, you get it.

If The Cradle is a story of quests, then Renee’s takes her backwards, into the caverns of her own self-deceit. This is one of her first stops: admitting that Jonathan existed, and that she met him at a party, and that at first, it didn’t seem like much of anything.

Like I said, one of her first stops. She keeps going.

Read an excerpt from The Cradle, and learn more about the book and author at Patrick Somerville's website.

Read the New York Times review of The Cradle.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Manual of Detection"

Jedediah Berry’s short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Best New American Voices and Best American Fantasy.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Manual of Detection, and reported the following:

File clerk Charles Unwin has just crossed the boundary between two worlds. In one of them, he’s been commuting by bicycle to a detective agency desk job for the last twenty years. The other world is considerably more dangerous, and all he knows about it comes from the case reports he files for star detective Travis Sivart. But Sivart has gone missing, and Unwin’s been promoted into his place. Now all he wants to do is find the detective so that he can have his old job back.

This leads him, on page 69, to the Forty Winks, a notorious barroom Sivart sometimes visited when he was desperate for information. The Forty Winks is in the basement of a mortuary, and the bartender, Edgar Zlatari, is also the cemetery’s caretaker and gravedigger. Naturally, he keeps the liquor in shelves made from coffins.

Unwin is trying hard to fit in here, but he stumbles as soon as Zlatari asks him what he wants to drink:

There were too many bottles stacked in that coffin, too many choices. What would Sivart have ordered? A hundred times the detective must have named his drinks of choice. But Unwin had stricken them from the reports, and now he found he could not remember even one. Instead the response to Emily’s secret phrase came uselessly to mind: And doubly in the bubbly.

“Root beer,” he said at last.

Zlatari blinked several times, as though maybe he had never heard of the stuff.

Readers may not be surprised to learn that Unwin makes more missteps—he’s out of his element, and he stays that way for a long time. Of course, that’s also what makes it hard for his adversaries to predict what he’ll do next.

Read an excerpt from The Manual of Detection and learn more about the book and author at Jedediah Berry's website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dream House"

Valerie Laken's work has appeared in Ploughshares, the Chicago Tribune, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Alaska Quarterly Review, the Antioch Review, and Meridian. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize, the Missouri Review Editors’ Prize, two Hopwood Awards, and an honorable mention in The Best American Short Stories. She is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin in Milwaukee, where she teaches creative writing.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Dream House--which was inspired by her own experience buying and remodeling a home in which a murder had occurred--and reported the following:

Dream House is the story of a young couple whose marriage unravels when they discover that the fixer-upper they've just bought was once the site of a murder. The book interweaves their story with the story of the man who committed the murder and, recently released from prison, begins lurking around the house.

Page 69 depicts the last night Kate and Stuart spend in their rickety little apartment before moving into the house. They are still naive at this point; they have no idea what problems lie ahead. But they are both struggling already with a nagging awareness that their marriage is on the rocks. Kate believes buying the house will solve their problems; Stuart has a bad feeling about the place and knows that changing their address won't fix what's broken between them. He agrees to buy the house anyway because "he liked what she was believing. He wanted to believe it too."

...Stuart and his friends moved boxes and furniture from one place to the other in a borrowed truck, and [Kate] stayed up late cleaning the old apartment so they could get back their security deposit in full. He came home after two in the morning, a little drunk, his T-shirt torn and misshapen with sweat. "Mission accomplished," he said, then staggered toward their all-but-empty bedroom for one last night.

Kate stayed in the kitchen, wiping out cabinets and washing the floors, and collecting their last forgotten items in a big box by the door. By 3:30 the place was clean, but she was wired on NoDoz and couldn't imagine sleeping. [...] She crawled out on the porch roof and sat watching a few remaining college kids stumble home from their bars and parties and thought, This is it. I'm graduating.

One thing that's happening at this stage of the book is that Kate and Stuart are sort of avoiding each other, especially in the bedroom. The book focuses on what this particular house means to each different character, but also on the complex role that any home plays in a family. Some people take better care of their homes than of the people inside them, and even people who don't go that far still face moments when either by choice or necessity they give more time or effort to their house or housekeeping than to their loved ones. Having a good-looking, well-kept house can give the impression that all is right with the family inside it, which can be very reassuring, and very deceptive.

Read an excerpt from Dream House, and learn more about the book and author at Valerie Laken's website and at the book's Facebook page.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Safer"

Sean Doolittle's novels include The Cleanup, Rain Dogs, Burn, and Dirt. His short stories have been collected in Plots With Guns and The Year's Best Mystery Stories 2002.

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

From p. 69 of Safer:

“Excuse me, your Honor?”

“I asked you a direct question. Have you been drinking?”

There’s a ripple of chatter behind me: a few whispers from the gallery, a low chuckle or two. I can hardly believe it. This is actually getting worse.

Douglas Bennett pauses as though he, too, can hardly believe it. He produces a facial expression that seems to indicate that he’s heard the question, and it has taken him aback. Or maybe bending over to pick up my case file has altered his equilibrium. Either way, he’s swaying noticeably on his feet.

He does his best to camouflage the imbalance, taking a moment to arrange his snarl of papers. He taps the file folder on the table, squaring away the edges. While he’s doing all this, he glances at the same clock above the bailiff, shakes his head like he’s heard a good joke, and says, “Judge, I think we’d agree that it’s a bit early in the day.”

“We would most certainly agree,” the judge says. “And you haven’t answered my question.”

“I believe that it goes without saying—”

“Counselor, are you, at this moment, inebriated in my court? Yes or no?”

“Absolutely not, your Honor.”

At this point, the prosecutor pipes up from the other table. “Your Honor, the People can smell defense counsel from here.”

I’d say this bit is a pretty fair yardstick for the rest of the book. Tone-wise, it’s a bit lighter than some of the later pages, but it’s certainly on the same weather map. Unfortunately for poor Paul Callaway--protaganist of the book and the “I” in this scene—it’s almost entirely representative of his situation that, on the morning of his arraignment on (presumably false) charges of sexual impropriety with the 13-year old girl next door, his defense attorney should show up late to court and half in the bag. Being page 69, it’s appropriate to assume that things get much worse before they get any better.

Would the skimming reader be inclined to keep turning pages? I guess I can’t say for sure, though if you’ve ever been drunk in a room full of sober people, it does sort of seem like they can’t help watching what you’ll do next, so here’s hoping....

Read an excerpt from Safer, and learn more about the author and his work at Sean Doolittle's website and blog.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Precious"

Sandra Novack’s fiction has appeared in The Iowa Review, The Gettysburg Review, Gulf Coast, and Mississippi Review, among other publications. She has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize three times, and holds an MFA from Vermont College.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Precious, and reported the following:

"Sometimes in life," Natalia began, "you breathe even when you don't want to. Sometimes in life, you take the bad along with the good and rub them together until something, however small, shines." -- from page 69 of Precious.

I just read over this page again, from the fourth chapter of my debut, Precious, where mom Natalia is about to leave her two girls and husband and run off with another man. Here, Natalia is trying to tell nine-year-old Sissy a story in order to prepare her for being alone. The lines above, from page 69, have much thematic resonance. This page concerns itself with story telling: how we tell stories in order to cope with loss, and in order to remember our collective histories and those people from the past who have vanished. In telling a story, that which is gone is remembered again, and we breathe life back into the past. So the "Page 69 Test" seems to hold for Precious, as being representative of central ideas in the book.

Read an excerpt from Precious, and learn more about the author and her work at Sandra Novack's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Blood and Ice"

Robert Masello is an award-winning journalist, a reformed television writer, and a bestselling novelist, whose most recent novels were the supernatural thrillers Vigil and Bestiary.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Blood and Ice, and reported the following:

In respect to page 69, there were pretty much two possibilities -- we would find ourselves either in Victorian England, or the present-day Antarctic. Blood and Ice alternates between the two.

As it turns out, page 69 takes place in the past -- in a posh, London bordello, catering to aristocrats -- one of whom is Lt. Sinclair Copley of the 17th Lancers, the cavalrymen who will later lead the ill-fated Charge of the Light Brigade in the Crimea.

For most of the book, Blood and Ice goes back and forth between these two eras, these two worlds, until -- with the discovery of a pair of frozen bodies in an underwater glacier -- the stories finally intermesh at a research station close to the South Pole. It's a hard book to summarize -- the publisher took a big leap of faith, buying it on a few chapters and a very brief proposal -- because the storylines initially seem so strange and separate. But that's what intrigued me. I like trying to make the unlikely, even the impossible, seem possible, or real.

One page is seldom representative of a whole book, but in this scene, Lt. Copley does show his true colors. A wealthy wastrel, given to gambling and drinking and worse, he is so outraged at the despoliation of a young girl in the bordello, at the hands of a man he already detests, that he risks his own life to come to her rescue. (In 1850s England, there were no laws against prostitution, and the age of consent was twelve. Furthermore, a premium was placed on virginal girls, as having sex with them was thought to cure various "amatory infections.") Characters in my books, like Lt. Copley, are rarely all bad or all good, and it's here, on page 69, that we get a sense of the lieutenant's underlying decency. Although the book is generally described as a "supernatural thriller," or something like that (and yes, there is a vampire element to the tale), I think of Blood and Ice as a very unusual love story at heart.

Read an excerpt from Blood and Ice and view the video trailer.

Learn more about the book and author at the publisher's website and Robert Masello's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Drop of Red"

Chris Marie Green writes the Vampire Babylon series, including Night Rising, Midnight Reign, and Break of Dawn.

She applied the Page 69 Test to the latest installment in the series, A Drop of Red, and reported the following:

My most recent release, A Drop of Red, Vampire Babylon, Book Four, is a series reboot of sorts. The initial trilogy covered the adventures of Dawn Madison and her vamp hunting team as they vanquished an underground society in Hollywood. Here, the team travels to London, where there are strong signs of another Underground. They’re tracking down clues to locate this community when page 69 appears, showcasing a “breather” in the first big action scene.

Frank, Dawn’s vampire father, is chiding his daughter and her spirit protector, Breisi, for running off alone to chase what they think might be a “bad” vampire. They’ve seen red eyes in the night, and it reminds Dawn of the grotesque Guard vamps who acted as sentries for the Hollywood community. Page 69 also shows the reader a couple of weapons/tools Dawn uses as a hunter: throwing blades and a “locator,” which can be tossed at a target and attached to their clothing in order to track them.

Best yet for the page 69 test, the page ends on a cliffhanger of sorts: “Fear creeping over her skin, Dawn saw the red eyes come to light several yards above [Frank’s] head, from the utter darkness of the inside-out building’s tubes….”

Read an excerpt from A Drop of Red, and learn more about the author and her work at Chris Marie Green's website.

My Book, The Movie: the Vampire Babylon series.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue