"Deadly Dance"

Hilary Bonner is the author of many crime novels and five non-fiction books. A past Chair of the Crime Writers' Association, she was previously the showbusiness editor of the Mail on Sunday and the Daily Mirror.

Bonner applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, Deadly Dance, and reported the following:

A teenaged schoolgirl, Melanie Cooke, has been found murdered in a city’s red-light district.

As usual family members are the principle suspects. The girl’s parents are divorced and both remarried. On page 69, Detective Sergeant John Willis visits the girl’s stepmother.

‘It’s just routine, Mrs Cooke,’ Willis told her. ‘I’m sure you know by now that Mr Cooke’s daughter has ben found dead?’

‘Yes of course, ‘replied Susan Cooke. ‘My Terry called almost as soon as he knew the worst. Terrible, Terrible, But I can’t help you.’

She goes on to explain that she hardly knew Melanie, in spite of being married to the dead girl's father.

‘He blames me for how we live. He certainly wouldn’t bring that girl to this place. Not his little princess.’

She paused, waving a hand wearily at the small, front garden, which was a brown desert growing only the odd stinging nettle, an old bedstead, a rusting bicycle, and a pile of bulging, black plastic rubbish bags. She touched a fading bruise on her left cheek.

This is the start of an interview which leads Willis to feel justified in reporting back to his superior officer, my regular series detective, geeky DI David Vogel, a compiler of crosswords and lover of backgammon, that Terry Cooke is the most likely perpetrator.

As far as Willis is concerned, the way the couple live, the obvious tension between them, and the fading bruise point to Cooke being a violent man.

When I first looked at page 69 I did not see it as being particularly significant in the development of the book. Them, when I thought about it, I realised it is actually highly significant.

Because, like almost everything in this novel, nothing is how it first seems.

What appears to be a tragic but all too familiar murder case scenario turns out to be anything but that.

There are actually three principal protagonists in Deadly Dance who each speak in the first person. But the reader does not know who they really are. At this stage Cooke may be one of them. Or he may not.

This ‘routine interview’ with the life of a principle suspect is not at all what it seems to be in any way.  And that makes the contents of page 69 a key component within Deadly Dance.

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--Marshal Zeringue