"You're Next"

Gregg Hurwitz is the critically acclaimed, internationally bestselling author of The Tower, Minutes to Burn, Do No Harm, The Kill Clause, The Program, Troubleshooter, Last Shot, The Crime Writer, Trust No One, and They’re Watching.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new thriller, You're Next, and reported the following:

Page 69 of You're Next gives us my intrepid hero, Mike Wingate, walking through a cemetery, looking at graves. A hobby of his. Okay…a strange hobby.

Let me rewind.

As a young boy, Mike was dropped off by his father at an unfamiliar playground and told to go play. Climbing out of the station wagon, he notices a drop of blood on his father’s sleeve. And You're Next opens there on that playground with morning turning to afternoon, as it slowly begins to dawn on a four-year-old boy that he has been abandoned.

By the time we meet Mike again, he’s grown up in foster homes and managed to put his life together. He has a job he enjoys and a wonderful wife and daughter. But as you can imagine, he’s spent his life haunted by the memory—and the mystery—of what happened so many years ago. When he was abandoned, he was too young even to recall his own last name and so he never was able to put together why his parents left him—or even who they were. They simply vanished. And so from time to time when he drives past a graveyard, he pulls over and walks around, looking at those cold headstones that stand for a finality he was never able to find. And of course, this tugs at a wound he can never heal:

He passed the aftermath of a service, people breaking off in solemn twosomes and quartets. A rubbed-raw exhaustion hung over the gathering, all those universal fears and vulnerabilities laid bare. And Mike at the periphery, traipsing between gravestones like a zombie, trying to convince himself that he came from somewhere, anywhere. Trying to convince himself that as a four-year-old boy, he might have been something worth keeping.

Little does he know that soon enough, those lifelong secrets will erupt, putting his family at risk and threatening to shatter everything he’s built.

He’s about to learn that the past isn’t gone. It’s just waiting.

View the You're Next trailer, and learn more about the book and author at Gregg Hurwitz's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue