"The Secrets of Tree Taylor"

Dandi Daley Mackall has written many books for children and adults. She has held a humorist column and served as freelance editor, has hosted over 200 radio phone-in programs, and has made dozens of appearances on TV. She conducts writing assemblies and workshops across the U.S. and keynotes at conferences and young author events. Her YA novel The Silence of Murder won an Edgar Award.

Mackall applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Secrets of Tree Taylor, and reported the following:

From page 69:

Far-Out!

Chuck mimicked putting a gun to his head and firing. “So, Tree, what’s your dad say about Old Man Kinney trying to kill himself?”

I didn’t answer.

“I thought it was an accident.” Somehow, Karen had ended up next to Jack again.

“Maybe . . . maybe not.” Chuck walked backward up the street a couple of feet. “Let’s see for ourselves!”

I didn’t want to agree with Chuck, but I liked the idea of checking out the house. Maybe we’d find a clue.

“So, what’s the plan, Chuck?” Jack asked. “You going to waltz up to the door and ask Mrs. Kinney if you can search her house?”

“I’m not going to ask her anything. I’ll see what I can see.” Chuck turned to Penny and me. “Who’s in?”

Tree Taylor has two goals for the summer of ’63: 1) Become a writer, or at least, write something that will earn her the freshman spot on the school paper; and 2) Experience her first real kiss. A kiss delivered by a boy. A boy who is not related to her.

So when a gunshot is fired right down the street, Tree knows this is the big story she’s been waiting for. But the more she goes digging, the more secrets she uncovers. And soon she begins to wonder: When is it important to expose the truth? And when is it right to keep a secret? Her summer, and this book, are filled with rock ‘n’ roll, hanging out at the swimming pool…and secrets. Set against the backdrop of the Vietnam War and the soundtrack of the Beach Boys and the Beatles, it’s a story of family, unexpected friendships, dancing under the summer stars, and the power—and weight—of carrying someone else’s secrets.

Page 69 shows the two main characters—Tree and Jack, her lifelong, big-brother-type buddy. And we get a peek at Chuck, one of the story’s bad guys. I guess I was surprised that I think a reader might be able to pick up the “flavor” of the book with this one page. Cool!

Visit Dandi Daley Mackall's website.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Dandi Daley Mackall & Moxie and Munch.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Every Hidden Fear"

Linda Rodriguez’s new book is Every Hidden Fear, third Skeet Bannion novel. Her second Skeet mystery, Every Broken Trust, was a selection of Las Comadres National Latino Book Club and is currently a finalist for both the International Latino Book Award and the Premio Aztlan Literary Prize. Her first Skeet novel, Every Last Secret, which won the Malice Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition, was a Barnes & Noble mystery pick and a finalist for the International Latino Book Award. Her short story, “The Good Neighbor,” which appeared in Kansas City Noir (Akashic Books), has been optioned for film. For her books of poetry, Skin Hunger and Heart’s Migration, Rodriguez received numerous awards and fellowships, including the Midwest Voices and Visions Award, Thorpe Menn Award, Elvira Cordero Cisneros Award, and Macondo and Ragdale Fellowships. She is immediate past president of the Borders Crimes chapter of Sisters in Crime, founding board member of Latino Writers Collective and The Writers Place, and a member of Wordcraft Circle of Native American Writers and Storytellers, Kansas City Cherokee Community, and International Thriller Writers.

Rodriguez applied the Page 69 Test to Every Hidden Fear and reported the following:

Leading up to page 69 of Every Hidden Fear, my protagonist Skeet Bannion has been dealing with a variety of difficult situations. Her Cherokee grandmother’s moved in with Skeet and her adopted son, Brian. Brian is suddenly dealing with unrequited love. A wealthy developer who was once a poor boy in town has returned to build a huge mall that will destroy the town’s existing businesses and has claimed paternity of the teenaged son of the town’s leading couple.

Then, she sets off for her usual early morning run, only to find her friend Joe, head of the town’s police force, trying to join her as part of his new unwelcome campaign to woo her. This made her almost welcome the body they found on the golf course they ran past—until she saw it was the developer, Ash Mowbray, and realized how this would affect so many people she cared about.

On page 69, she’s come home late for breakfast and told Gran and Brian what she found.

“Are they looking at Noah and his family?” asked Gran as she polished off her single piece of bacon.

I shook my head at her, but Brian had stopped eating to stare at me.

“They won’t think Noah did it, will they?”

“They have to look at everybody who had any grudge against him.” I got up to pour myself more coffee and refilled Gran’s cup, as well. “And he went out of his way to give a lot of people grudges against him. So they’ll be looking at a lot of people for this.”

I leaned back against the kitchen counter for a minute. “They’ll probably question Noah and his folks, but that doesn’t mean anything in a case with this many people angry at the victim.”

Brian nodded, looking relieved, and turned back to the food. “Do either of you want the last piece of bacon?”

Gran leaned back in her chair and looked up at me. “That man’s going to keep on making trouble for everyone, even from the grave, isn’t he?”

This case is not Skeet’s murder to investigate, for which she’s grateful, but Skeet’s about to be caught off guard in a big way when Ash Mowbray’s unpleasantly complicated murder is dumped in her lap to solve. Her friends and neighbors and the boyfriend of the girl Brian loves are all involved in one way or another, and Skeet must untangle all their motives and lies before someone innocent pays a horrible price—or the killer kills again.

So page 69 is the beginning of a turning point in the novel where Skeet will take up this murder to solve and find it entangled with and made more difficult by all those problem situations she’s already juggling.

Find Linda Rodriguez on Twitter, on Facebook, and on blogs with The Stiletto Gang, Writers Who Kill, and her own blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Plaster City"

Johnny Shaw was born and raised on the Calexico/Mexicali border, the setting for his Jimmy Veeder Fiasco novels, Dove Season and Plaster City. He is also the author of the Anthony Award-winning adventure novel, Big Maria.

Shaw applied the Page 69 Test to Plaster City and reported the following:

To me, the spirit of the Page 69 Test is for the page to stand on its own. Out of context, warts and all. Does it convey a voice, a character, or a question that will intrigue the reader to want to read more?

So in that spirit, I’m going to lay down the back jacket copy of Plaster City: A Jimmy Veeder Fiasco, followed by the entirety of Page 69 with no annotations.
Here’s the back jacket copy:

Jimmy Veeder and Bobby Maves are back at it, two years after the events of Dove Season—they’re not exactly the luckiest guys in the Imperial Valley, but, hey, they win more fights than they lose.

Settled on his own farmland and living like a true family man after years of irresponsible fun, Jimmy’s got a straight life cut out for him. But he’s knocking years off that life thanks to fun-yet-dangerous Bobby’s booze-addled antics—especially now that Bobby is single, volatile, profane as ever, and bored as hell.

When Bobby’s teenage daughter goes missing, he and Jimmy take off on a misadventure that starts out as merely unfortunate and escalates to downright calamitous. Bobby won’t hesitate to kick a hornets’ nest to get the girl to safety, but when the rescue mission goes riotously sideways, the duo’s grit—and loyalty to each other—is put to the test.

And here’s Page 69:

Before we headed out, we made a drunk stratagem to stay on the residential streets and not drive over twenty-five miles per hour, because that’s the kind of elaborate preparations you construct when you’re drunk and have a stratagem.

“Should we bring the guns?” Bobby asked.

“What guns?”

“The just-in-case guns I brought.”

“Show me.”

Bobby went to the closet and pulled out a long gym bag.

“When did you put that in there?”

“When you were getting beer.”

Then, one at a time, Bobby pulled out four pistols, a rifle, and two shotguns. He spread them out on the bed like he was displaying them for sale. It was an impressive arsenal.

“Seven guns,” I said. “For two people.”

“Actually, I didn’t know you were coming. These were intended for my personal use.”

“Were you going to tie them all together and make a super-gun?”

“No, one at a time. If the opportunity arose. Although, let’s consider the super-gun idea. I never turn my back on awesome. Seven is stupid, though. But I could definitely do something with two shotguns. And if I had a sword and some duct tape--I should be writing this down.”

“Let’s leaves the guns,” I said. “We’re drunk. They’re guns. I’m not loving the combo.”

“What if we run into trouble?”

Visit Johnny Shaw's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Murder at Honeychurch Hall"

Hannah Dennison began her writing career in 1977 as a trainee reporter for a small West Country newspaper in Devon, England. She is a member of Sisters in Crime, Mystery Writers of America, the Willamette Writers, British Crime Writers’ Association and Toastmasters International. Dennison's books include the Vicky Hill mysteries.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Murder at Honeychurch Hall, and reported the following:

As luck would have it, page 69 starts Chapter Six:

It took me ages to fall asleep. I wasn’t used to the silence. Living so close to Putney Bridge tube station, I no longer heard the last train rumbling out or the first train screeching in. Yet here, in the middle of nowhere, the quiet seemed—loud—apart from the occasional burst of scrabbling claws overhead that I was convinced were rats.

David’s insistence that I stick with Fakes & Treasures really bothered me. I wished I could make him understand that I wasn’t like Trudy. I’d never sought fame and I hated it. I was still haunted by the most humiliating moment of my life known as “The Big Sneeze” that continued to fly around the Internet on YouTube. Just thinking about it made me feel hot with embarrassment.

I must have drifted into dreamland because the next thing I heard were voices under my window. According to my old pink alarm clock, it was almost eight-thirty in the morning. I scrambled out of bed and peered outside where Mum and William in Wellington boots, stood ankle deep in a pool of muddy water.

William—sleeves rolled up—was rotating a long iron rod that was stuck into the ground. Presumably this was the infamous water valve that Eric loved to tamper with.

This was an interesting experiment that shows my 39-year-old protagonist Kat Stanford’s life is in transition. She’s just quit her hit antique road show but this has caused cracks in her relationship with her not-yet-divorced–boyfriend, David.

Kat’s newly-widowed mother Iris has recklessly purchased a dilapidated carriage house two hundred miles away on a country estate and had re-created Kat’s childhood bedroom for her—hence the “old pink alarm clock.” Kat’s worried because the two of them had agreed to go into business together so she has gone after Iris to make her “see sense” and return to London. Kat just can’t understand her mother’s odd decision—and we’ll learn that the reason is just one of many of Iris’s secrets.

We meet the stable manager, William (late fifties), who is fond of showing off his biceps with his “sleeves rolled up.” Kat thinks William is after her mother’s money. That particular morning, William and Iris “ankle deep in a pool of muddy water” hint at another “below-stairs” employee called Eric who is making Iris’s life difficult. And yes, we’ll soon find out why.

The story is set on a crumbling—but grand—country estate in Devon, England with a fish-out-of-water scenario for both mother and daughter. Yet mystery and murder aside, the core of the story is the relationship between a mother and daughter facing new and uncertain beginnings. I’m fascinated by the notion that it’s sometimes those who are nearest and dearest to us who are often the most duplicitous of all.

Here’s hoping that readers will feel intrigued enough to read on so they can find out exactly what roles David, William and Eric play in the mystery; perhaps to wonder if Kat will be successful in her quest to drag her mother back to London but most of all, they’ll want to know the reason behind Iris’s obsession with Honeychurch Hall.

Visit Hannah Dennison's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Summer State of Mind"

Jen Calonita would never have fought her parents on going to sleepaway camp. She did, however, try to get out of a school camping trip for fear of spiders crawling into her sleeping bag. When she isn't writing, the author of the Secrets of My Hollywood Life and the Belles series can be found at the beach or floating in the pool.

Calonita applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, Summer State of Mind, and reported the following:

"You might be used to getting your way back home, Harper McAllister, but that is not how things work at Whispering Pines." -- Ethan Thompson

I was so relieved when I saw this quote on page 69 because it sums up my character Harper's whole experience at camp. Harper is a total girly girl who has gotten a little too comfortable with the finer things in life ever since her family came into money. She cannot function without her Starbucks or her industrial strength flat iron. She lives for weekly manicures. She hates anything outdoorsy unless it's her cabana at the beach on Long Island. Sleepaway camp is completely off her radar and the last thing she'd want to do for the summer and yet, on page 69, here she is. She's obviously forced to attend by her parents, who want her to get a dose of reality, but that doesn't mean Harper is ready to embrace camp life just yet. On page 69, she's in the middle of a zipline challenge and she's not too happy about it. She'd like to helicopter off the zipline if she could, but Ethan, a boy who thinks he has Harper pegged, is not going to let her off the hook that easily. He's a camp "lifer" so to speak. He's gone to camp forever and while Harper may be Ms. Popular back home at their school, Ethan is the guy to know at camp and he's not having any of Harper's whining. But I won't give away what happens at the bottom of that page or the pages that follow. All I'll say is that I think they're funny. If you're looking for a light read this summer, Summer could be exactly what you're looking for.

Visit Jen Calonita's website.

Read--Coffee with a Canine: Jen Calonita and Captain Jack Sparrow.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Catch a Falling Star"

Sourcebooks Fire published Kim Culbertson’s award winning first YA novel Songs for a Teenage Nomad (2010, originally Hip Pocket Press, 2007) and her second YA novel Instructions for a Broken Heart (2011) which was named a Booklist 2011 Top Ten Romance Title for Youth and won the 2012 Northern California Book Award for YA Fiction.

Culbertson applied the Page 69 Test to Catch a Falling Star, her latest novel, and reported the following:

Nothing ever happens in Little, CA. Which is just the way 17 year old Carter Moon likes it. She likes her life working in her parents’ café, stargazing with her friends, and not thinking about the big world of her future. When Hollywood arrives in the form of a different sort of star – teenage superstar turned PR mess Adam Jakes – to film a Christmas movie (in June), Carter wants nothing to do with his glittery life. But when Hollywood makes her an offer she can’t refuse (as Adam’s fake girlfriend to improve his PR), Carter has to finally contemplate a life beyond Little. On page 69, Carter has introduced Adam to her Hollywood-obsessed friend, Chloe, who freaks out in the middle of Little Eats, Carter’s café, at the sight of this famous boy. Mortified, Carter asks Adam if this happens a lot to which he responds, “Yes. Yes, that happens quite a lot.” She’s shocked at how he can just keep eating his sandwich, even as the café goes into red alert around him. Watching him, Carter starts to have her first taste of the darker side of fame. As their three weeks together unfold, Carter begins to realize that sometimes life goes off script. Perhaps, she also finds, this might actually be the point of living.

Visit Kim Culbertson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Summer on the Short Bus"

Bethany Crandell writes young adult novels because the feelings that come with life's "first" times are too good not to relive again and again. She lives in San Diego with her husband and two daughters.

Crandell applied the Page 69 Test to Summer on the Short Bus, her debut novel, and reported the following:

Cricket Montgomery would rather gnaw off her own fingers than be caught dead inside a WalMart, so you can imagine her disgust when she learns she’ll be spending her summer working at a camp for handicapped teenagers.

On page 69, we meet up with Cricket and the gang from Camp-I-Can at a late night bonfire. Cricket’s already working on escaping handicapped hell once these campers go to bed, but getting them there could prove to be a trickier undertaking than she planned. The sarcasm and tone is pretty spot-on for the rest of the book. All things said, I’d say this definitely passes the page 69 test.

“Are you going to tuck us in?” Claire asks.

“You’re kidding right?”

They shake their heads.

“Aren’t you guys like thirteen?”

“Fourteeeeeen,” Meredith answers.

“Fine, fourteen. Whatever. Don’t you think you’re a little too old to get tucked in?”

“No,” Claire answers quickly.

I turn to Fantine hoping she’ll confirm that my nighttime duties to not include bedtime stories, but she’s too busy dealing with her own campers to offer me any help.

“Ugh, fine,” I say. “I’ll do it, just stop talking about it.” Not like I’ll be around to do it again.

“Yay!” Claire shouts and pumps her first in the air. “Chirp! Chirp! Cricket’s putting us to bed. Cricket’s putting us to bed!”

Before I can say, “chirp again and die,” the commotion of movie night starts up all over again. Meredith is popping wheelies in the dirt, yelling, “Cricket is the bedtime queeeeeen!” while Robyn, who made a miraculous recovery thanks to a bottle of Pepto, suddenly joins the festivities and is clapping her hands together, cackling like a hyena.

“Hey, what’s going on over there?” Quinn’s voice suddenly emerges from the other side of the dwindling campfire. “Are you trying to wake the dead?”

“Cricket’s putting us to bed!” Claire calls back.

Visit Bethany Crandell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bred in the Bone"

Christopher Brookmyre is one of Britain's leading crime novelists. He has won many awards for his work, including the Critics' First Blood Award, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award. He has worked as a journalist for several British newspapers and is the author of many novels, including One Fine Day in the Middle of the Night, Quite Ugly One Morning, and Not the End of the World.

Brookmyre applied the Page 69 Test to Bred in the Bone, the third book in the Jasmine Sharp and Catherine McLeod series, and reported the following:

By chance, page 69 of Bred in the Bone falls within a scene that was actually the first thing I wrote in what ultimately became the Jasmine Sharp trilogy. I wrote this passage in 2009, expecting it to form part of Where the Bodies are Buried: perhaps as a mysterious prologue, the relevance of which would only reveal itself later in the story; I could not have anticipated quite how much later. This scene, and the storyline it underpins, did not make it into Where the Bodies are Buried, or its sequel, When the Devil Drives, but found what turned out to be its right and proper place in the conclusion of the trilogy.

The hen had bled its last. She placed its body delicately on the block and took the bucket over to the drain at the foot of the thickest roan pipe, a few feet to the left of the kitchen windows. The grate was discoloured, stained by thousands of such outpourings as she was depositing now, going back at least a hundred years. She would rinse out the bucket and fill it with water, as hot as the kitchen tap could produce, then immerse the chicken for a couple of minutes for ease of plucking. No great sense of timeless ritual about that, though it had been going on for precisely as long. Just mess and tedium.

It is a tricky scene to discuss in isolation, as it is impossible for me to reveal from whose point of view it is written, or even when it is set, without giving away massive spoilers. What I can say is that it introduces a motif that runs throughout the novel, which is perhaps why it formed something of an overture in the actual writing process.

This entire trilogy, and Bred in the Bone in particular, is about the effect that killing has upon its perpetrators as much as it is about the victims, those left to pick up the pieces or those charged with investigating the crimes. The passage on page 69 describes a girl slaughtering a chicken on a farm, depicting it as a mundane domestic chore, but providing the occasion for a wider meditation upon the act of killing, and upon the different meanings and consequences such an act can have.

I was struck by the fact that killing used to be far more of a day-to-day experience for many people in the course of making sure there was food on the family table, in contrast to now, when most of us are blithely detached from the slaughter of even a domestic fowl.

She felt no more squeamish about the prospect of eviscerating a dead chicken than she had about killing it, though it brought a flush to her cheeks to remember the embarrassment it had caused her at school a few weeks back when she made the mistake of mentioning this domestic duty among a group of her classmates. Her words had barely left her lips when she realised they constituted another gift to the cliques who already viewed her with gleeful disdain: an awkward oddity, precipitated upon the perfection of their posh little circles from some stinky rural backwater.

The chapter does not suggest that this more commonplace exposure to killing made people desensitised, but rather more aware of the distinction between an act of violence and an act necessary to on-going survival. To this end the girl’s father has stressed that her duty must be carried out with decorum: "We’re taking this creature’s life to preserve our own. Killing something is a sacrifice – it’s always a sacrifice, and a sacrifice should be solemn. We’ll live off this creature today and tomorrow too."

Nonetheless, this is a girl who is learning to kill, who is used to literally having blood on her hands, and who has come to understand that lives can and must be sacrificed when her family’s survival is at stake. It was a story I intended to tell all along, and one that has the greater resonance for its secret being revealed at the end rather than the beginning of the trilogy.

Visit Christopher Brookmyre's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Trident Deception"

A native of Cocoa, Florida, Rick Campbell attended the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, and spent over thirty years in the Navy. His tours of duty include four nuclear powered submarines, the Pentagon, and the Undersea Weapons Program Office. On his last submarine, he was one of the two men whose permission was required to launch its twenty-four nuclear warhead-tipped missiles.

Campbell considered writing for many years, and as he approached retirement from the Navy, he wrote The Trident Deception, a novel that draws on his extensive knowledge of submarine warfare. He applied the Page 69 Test to The Trident Deception and reported the following:

I think The Trident Deception gets both an "A" and an "F" for The Page 69 Test. For reference, page 69 begins with:

A black Suburban, its blue lights flashing, crossed the 14th Street Bridge at the end of rush hour. Forcing its way across three lanes of heavy traffic, an identical Suburban followed closely behind. Christine, sitting in the passenger seat of the lead vehicle next to Agent Kenney, ended her phone call without a word, her eyes fixed on the rapidly nearing Pentagon.

And page 69 ends with:

Christine and the two agents sped through the Pentagon entrance as they flashed their badges to security personnel, then after dropping down three levels via the A-Ring escalators, headed out along Corridor 9 toward the outermost ring. They eventually reached the end of a long hallway where two Marines stood in front of a large security door.

“Open the door,” Christine ordered.

“We can’t,” the Marine on the left answered, "the door won’t unlock, and there's no response from inside."

The Trident Deception is a thriller, and I think page 69 captures that essence. No fancy prose, no deep thought about the meaning of life. But I think it piques your average thriller reader's attention - What's going on? Why are they racing to the Pentagon? Why won't the door unlock? Who's inside and why aren't they answering? And of course, the scene incorporates the essential thriller ingredient of the race against time. So I think it gets an "A" for that part.

However, more specifically, The Trident Deception is billed as a submarine thriller, and page 69 does not accurately capture that! (It's actually about 50% submarine thriller and 50% espionage / political thriller, and page 69 captures the non-submarine parts of the plot.) So I think page 69 gets an "F" for not being representative of the submarine thriller part of the book.

Learn more about the book and author at Rick Campbell's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Don't Ever Look Back"

Daniel Friedman is a graduate of the University of Maryland and NYU School of Law. His first novel, Don't Ever Get Old was nominated for the Edgar, Thriller, Anthony and Macavity awards, and was optioned for film by the producers of the "Sherlock Holmes" movies.

Friedman applied the Page 69 Test to his new book, Don't Ever Look Back, and reported the following:

In Don't Ever Look Back my series protagonist faces off against a master thief named Elijah in two intertwining narratives; one in the present day, when they're both elderly men and Elijah asks Buck to help him protect him from mysterious killers, and one in the 1965, when Buck was a police detective trying to thwart Elijah's scheme to rob a Memphis bank.

On page 69, Buck, in 1965, is trying to figure out what Elijah is up to. A snitch told him that Elijah's robbery is somehow connected to a civil rights strike, so Buck is visiting a labor organizer and civil rights activist named Longfellow Molloy, who is not happy about being questioned by the police.

Since Buck is an 88 year-old retired Memphis police detective, his career would have spanned from the late 1940's to the late 1970's, a period which included the integration of the Memphis public schools, the Memphis sanitation strike and the assassination of Martin Luther King. The law and the people who enforce it tend to protect the established power structure and the status quo, and Southern state and local officials during that era, including the police, were generally on the wrong side of the civil rights issue.

I wanted to explore where Buck had fit into that conflict. Brian, Buck's son, believes Jews have a special responsibility, as members of a historically persecuted group, to stand with the victims of oppression. But the Holocaust is recent history for Buck, who was captured and tortured by the Nazis. As one of very few Jews on the police force and part of a fairly small Jewish community in the city of Memphis, Buck feels vulnerable. He's not sure whether Jews are white people, or some kind of other, and he would prefer not to encourage people to ask that question.

So, when Buck meets Longfellow Molloy, he's not necessarily hostile to the strikers' goals. Buck's interests and identity aren't premised an idea of white supremacy, because Buck isn't even sure if he's white. But Buck isn't particularly sympathetic either. And he knows something suspicious is going on, but he doesn't know what, so there's conflict between these characters.

From page 69:

“Let me tell you something about Memphis, Detective,” said Longfellow Molloy, the labor agitator. “Memphis don’t make nothin’. Memphis don’t grow nothin’. Memphis exists but for one purpose: Memphis moves things. The rail lines and the highway and the river all come together in this place. Memphis is one of the five biggest inland ports in the history of Western civilization. Fifteen million tons of cargo come through here, ship to shore, and shore to ship. Loaded and unloaded, from the bellies of barges into the trailers of trucks. Onto train cars. And do you know how fifteen million tons of cargo gets loaded and unloaded in this town every year?”

I knew he’d only asked the question so he could answer it himself, so I sat quiet and let him blow off steam.

“Black hands,” he said. “Black hands do all that lifting. Memphis earns its bread from moving things, and black folks do all the moving. Fifteen million tons, ship to shore, and shore to ship. We carry it. Those men marching outside the offices of Kluge Shipping bear this city on their backs seven days a week for a dollar seventy-five an hour. We’re trying to organize and ask for the square deal every hardworking American deserves. And you come up here and you treat us like criminals. You come into my office, where I do the Lord’s work, and you treat me like a low-life thug. Sir, I will not have it.”

Paul Schulman had given me two leads on Elijah: that the target was somehow related to striking freight workers, and that Ari Plotkin had a piece of the job. Plotkin was simpler to get at; I could just pick him up and kick the shit out of him until he spilled whatever he knew. But if I did, Elijah would know about it immediately, and my best lead would be burned. So I’d decided to sniff around the strike first. And since I didn’t really know who else to talk to, I decided to pay a visit to the angry black man I’d seen on the TV. Not exactly brilliant deductive work on my part, I’ll admit, but I never said I was Sherlock Holmes.

Molloy described himself an “activist” or an “organizer,” but he was more of an instigator. He’d come to Memphis a few months earlier and rented a small office across the street from the downtown skyscraper that housed the headquarters of Kluge Shipping and Freight. Kluge was one of dozens of companies that handled river cargo, and it was a medium-sized outfit at best, but it was notable for paying poorly, and its laborers were almost all black, so it was an ideal target for a civil rights rabble-rouser. The forklift operators and longshoremen were receptive to his talk about wage inequalities and dignity, and he was starting to cause pain in many rich, white asses.

Over the course of the last couple of months, Molloy had gotten more than half the company’s colored workers organized. Six weeks previous, 120 men walked out of the company’s facility on Governor’s Island. Since then, they’d been marching around in front of Kluge’s downtown office, waving signs, hassling businessmen, and frightening secretaries.

Visit Daniel Friedman's blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Xom-B"

Jeremy Robinson is the bestselling author of more than forty novels including Island 731, SecondWorld, the Jack Sigler thriller series, and Project Nemesis, the highest selling original (non-licensed) kaiju novel of all time. Robinson is also known as the #1 Amazon.com horror writer, Jeremy Bishop, author of The Sentinel and the controversial novel, Torment. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and three children.

Robinson applied the Page 69 Test to Xom-B, his new novel, and reported the following:

In my new sci-fi thriller, Xom-B, the character of Freeman is a genius with an uncommon mixture of memory, intelligence, creativity and compassion. He lives in a worldwide utopia, but his people once lived as slaves to another race referred to simply as “Master.” A revolution led to freedom from the Masters, but now the world is threatened by a virus, spread through bites, sweeping through the population. The infected are propelled to violence. Freeman searches for a cure, but instead he finds the source—the Masters, intent on reclaiming the world.

I think Xom-B passes the Page 69 test, but only just. It begins a new chapter and shows us some of the world building that goes on in the earlier part of the novel:

As we near our destination, the buildings appear to grow, and not just the color-framed black spears of the Uppers, but the brick buildings of the neighborhood through which we’re running. Based on the language I’ve heard Jimbo employ to describe the Uppers and his desire to reside there, I believe height is somehow attached to status, which might explain why Jimbo’s mood is permanently set to sour. Perhaps it’s the ability to look down on others that insinuates a higher station? I say insinuates because I live in a very simple dwelling, far from the city with just two stories, yet my worth to the Council is quite high. I don’t know why, only that they look at me with admiration and pride that suggests equal status with them, if not elevated. And I’m willing to bet that the Council makes their homes in the tallest buildings of the Uppers.

The scene also shows Freeman’s (the narrator) innocence and hints at the mystery of Freeman’s importance.

Page 69 also shows something of the journey aspect to the book:

“How much further?” I ask, my voice coming out warbled as each step jounces Jimbo on my back.

“One point three miles,” Luscious replies with uncommon precision. She must note my surprise because she adds, “I walk this route every day.”

I’m about to say something encouraging—we’re almost there, just another minute, we’re going to make it, something like that—but a very nearby scream turns me around.

And finally, Page 69 gives some hints at the menace, tension and pace of the story, but I won’t include an excerpt of that here, because it contains spoilers.

Learn more about the book and author at Jeremy Robinson's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The One Safe Place"

Tania Unsworth is a British writer living in Boston. She is the author of two books for adults published in the UK. The One Safe Place is her first book for children.

Unsworth applied the Page 69 Test to The One Safe Place and reported the following:

I feel a bit of a cheat because The One Safe Place was published in both the UK and the US at almost the same time and page 69 falls in a slightly different place in each edition. But I’m going to go with UK page 69 because it marks a sinister turn of events in the story. Devin and Kit, homeless children in a climate-change devastated near future have found their way to The Gabriel H Penn Home for Childhood. On first inspection, the Home seems like paradise, with food in plenty and entertainments around every corner. But as they are being shown around by a kid called Luke, it begins to dawn on Devin that all is not as it seems.

“A narrow path wound between low trees. Their trunks were curled and knotted like clumps of writhing snakes. “Where does this go to?”

Luke hesitated. His twitching face was suddenly quite still. “We don’t need to got down there,” he said quickly. “I’ve got to take you to the recreation hall.” And he nudged them away down another path.”

Although the recreation hall looks like fun, Devin can’t help noticing that none of the other kids are actually playing with any of the toys. They’re just standing around listlessly. Then he notices something else.

“As they turned to leave, Devin halted suddenly. He had the strangest sensation of being watched. He looked around but the room was empty. There was a window set up high on the far wall. It didn’t face the outside and he could see nothing through it, only the briefest impression of a shadow behind the glass. The shadow moved and was gone.”

Turn the page, and you discover that Devin is right. The watchers are the Visitors, very old, very rich and weirdly fascinated by the children. It’s the first big indication that the Home is far from paradise and that terrible things lie in store for every child that passes through its gates…

Visit Tania Unsworth's website.

--Marshal Zeringue