"The Window"

Amelia Brunskill was born in Melbourne, Australia, but she grew up mostly in Washington state where she picked a lot of blackberries, read a lot of books and failed to properly appreciate the epic beauty of the mountains and the Pacific ocean. She earned her bachelor’s degrees in psychology and art from the University of Washington and her master’s in information studies from the University of Texas at Austin. She now lives in Chicago, where she eats as much Thai food as possible and works as a librarian.

Brunskill applied the Page 69 Test to The Window, her debut novel, and reported the following:

From page 69:

Today it happened in English class. A simple thing triggered it: the girl in front of me playing with her hair. She’d been twirling it around her hand and letting it fall back down to bounce over her shoulders. Finally, she’d picked up a pencil and twisted her hair with it, fixing it tidily into place with a final decisive thrust. Anna used to try to do that, biting her lip in concentration as she worked the pencil into her hair, only to have it all come tumbling back down. For one moment, the girl in front of me was Anna: Anna who’d gotten the best of that stupid pencil. In the next moment, she wasn’t anything like her.

Blood rushed in my ears and the space around me contracted. The wave was coming, so close I could touch it, hear its roar.

In some ways, page 69 of The Window is definitely representative of the rest of the book. In this page, we see Jess, who is grieving the loss of her twin sister, Anna, reacting to a classmate in whom, very briefly, she sees her sister again. Much of The Window is about how Jess, and several other characters in the novel, react to intense loss and trauma, and how they struggle with finding a linear path to feeling whole again, so in that way it is certainly a representative page from the book. Additionally, it highlights Jess’s strong sense of Anna’s habits and gestures, from all of the time they spent together, and the intense bond that they shared.

In other ways though, it’s not so representative. For most of the book, Jess is trying to focus on finding answers to the questions she has about what happened on the night of her sister’s death, and she is actively fighting against letting herself be consumed by her loss, which really besieges her here. Also, the book really explores how much Jess missed when it came to her sister, in the weeks and months before her death, so in some ways this is a counterpoint to that—she knew her sister’s habits and gestures, and yet she did not pick up on any of the signs that her sister’s world was spiraling out from under her.

Visit Amelia Brunskill's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"One Way"

Simon Morden trained as a planetary geologist, realized he was never going to get into space, and decided to write about it instead. His writing career includes an eclectic mix of short stories, novellas and novels which blend science fiction, fantasy and horror, a five-year stint as an editor for the British Science Fiction Association, a judge for the Arthur C Clarke Awards, and regular speaking engagements at the Greenbelt arts festival.

Morden applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, One Way, and reported the following:

Page 69? Let’s look at the UK edition. Our heroes – it’s not obvious just from page 69 that all these people are convicts – are being trained to build a Mars base. They’re working together. They have to be a team. This is only the second time they’ve all been together in one place, unsupervised. And they’re doing it.

But let’s not paint an unrealistic picture here. Four of the seven people here are killers. Frank shot a man. Alice euthanised her patients. Zeus was the perpetrator of a one-punch. Marcy disabled the auto-drive on her truck and killed over a score of people in a traffic jam.

Also, Zeus is an allegedly reformed neo-Nazi, and two of the crew are black.

Between them, Marcy and Frank got the cylinder off the trailer and onto the ground. She glanced around and pulled him close. ‘How are they doing?’

‘Getting on like a pressure cooker. Zeus is the least of my worries. Least of yours, too. Hell, we’ve all got some corners we can afford to have knocked off.’

The cylinder was closed by releasable bolts recessed into the outer shell and protected by pull up hatches. Frank pressed on the back of the first hatch so that it lifted proud of the surface, and wedged his fingertips under the leading edge. He pulled, and the spring-loaded mechanism snapped it into the upright position.

Zeus was there, doing the same thing on the next, and Zero beyond him.

The restraining bolts were screw-thread, big wings on the heads, released with a twist and pull. The cavity they extended into was just about large enough to get a hand in. Not Zeus’s hand, but he could help open the other hatches while someone smaller – Marcy, in this case – worked the bolt. A tool for this would be useful, but they didn’t appear to have one: Frank made a mental note to mention it later. To someone. Maybe even Brack.

Frank isn’t in charge of anything: Brack is their supervisor, their guard. But each con has their area of competency, and Frank had run a small construction company before getting locked up. So Frank has to take the lead here, to get people who wouldn’t normally give each other the time of day to work as one unit.

There’s a lot riding on this: at this stage they all know that they’re disposable. If they flunk training, they’ll be sent straight back to prison – and not just regular prison, but SuperMax. Solitary confinement. Forever. Damn straight they’d better get this right.

Visit Simon Morden's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Unruly Creatures"

Jennifer Caloyeras is a novelist and short fiction writer living in Los Angeles. Her debut short fiction collection, Unruly Creatures (2017), was published by West Virginia University Press. She is the author of two young adult novels: Strays (2015) and Urban Falcon (2009). Her short stories have appeared in Monday Night Literary, Wilde Magazine, Storm Cellar, Booth and other literary journals.

Caloyeras applied the Page 69 Test to Unruly Creatures and reported the following:

Wow, I was nervous to see what was on page 69 and found that we are dropped in the middle of a story called, "Bloodletting." In this story, a woman named Shea has just had a double mastectomy. Her brother, a leech doctor (think back to the days of yore when people with medical conditions would be “bled” to release toxins) is nursing her back to health in his home. At the same time, a meteor has recently crashed in their small town causing a gaping hole that a dairy cow has gotten stuck in. Shea finds a sisterhood with the cow in terms of feeling confined in her current situation. The meteor, it turns out, is radioactive and evacuation is recommended. On page 69, Shea has gone to tell her brother the news, that it’s time to leave. But when she gets to his office, she catches him in a compromised position:

She opened the door of the examination room and to her surprise, she found her brother, naked on the table, covered in leeches, looking like someone had glued large black jellybeans all over his chest. His eyes were closed, in a state of such ecstasy that even in her shock, she didn’t want to interrupt him. Intimacy like this shouldn’t be disturbed.

So, yes, while this is a small glimpse of a particular story, I think throughout my collection we get a glimpse of characters in moments of intimacy and alienation. These characters struggle to subvert, contain, control and escape their bodies through dark humor and magical realism.

Visit Jennifer Caloyeras's website, blog, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Coffee with a Canine: Jennifer Caloyeras & Reba and Dingo.

--Marshal Zeringue

"From Darkest Skies"

Sam Peters is a mathematician, part-time gentle-person adventurer and occasional screenwriter who has seen faces glaze over at the words ‘science fiction’ once too often. His inspirations include Dennis Potter, Mary Doria Russell, Lynda La Plante, Neal Stephenson, and Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. He has more hopes than regrets, more cats than children, watches a lot of violent contact sport and is an unrepentant closet goth.

Peters applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, From Darkest Skies, and reported the following:

From page 69:

Hale Wavey slips unseen through the corridors of the Tesseract. There are surveillance cameras everywhere here in the heart of the Magenta Investigation Bureau, but Hale Wavey doesn’t worry about that because Hale Wavey is wearing a Masters’ skin-suit stolen from the Gibraltar Tech-Fair three months ago. Invisibility has its limitations, like everything else, but it’s good enough for this.

Hale’s Servant cracks the access codes for the low-security level. He lets the suit do its work for the rest, tailgating the night patrols as they do their rounds, meticulously checking every room and so taking him anywhere and everywhere he could want to go. When they reach the secure zones they work in teams of three with a pair of drones watching over them, feeding back to the security citadel which towers over the entrance to the Tesseract, the only part of the building that rises more than a single storey above the ground. The deep secure bunkers will be a problem, if ever Hale needs to go where the real secrets are kept, but today’s task is a simple one.

So begins page 69 of From Darkest Skies.

Agent Keon Rause is an investigator on Magenta, a backwater colony world. As the story starts, he’s looking into the mysterious death of a minor celebrity from an apparent overdose, but that’s not where his real attention lies: Five years ago, Keon’s wife Alysha, a fellow investigator, was killed in an apparently random terrorist attack; the perpetrator has been caught and tried but Keon has never shaken the idea that there was more to it than was uncovered at the time. In trying to cope with his grief, Keon has built an artificial intelligence simulation of his dead wife, a walking talking copy of Alysha almost indistinguishable from the real thing whom he calls Liss. Almost indistinguishable, but not quite.

The story I set out to write is half SF conspiracy thriller, half SF love story and all with a noir feel. Quietly and under the radar, Keon is trying to find out what really happened to his wife while Liss is trying to find out who this woman she’s supposed to be really was under the surface. As they peel back the layers of mystery surrounding both Alysha and Magenta’s history and the lines between what is human and what isn’t grow ever more blurred, the more they both have to question both what they are to each other and how well either of them truly know the real Alysha. Underneath it all, the theme of From Darkest Skies is about not knowing the world around you as well as you think.

We’ve never met Hale Wavey before page 69, nor will we meet him again after he submerges a few pages later. He ghosts into the narrative and ghosts out again leaving only questions. He has nothing much to do with either of the mysteries Keon is trying to solve and sheds no light on Keon’s relationship with either Liss or Alysha. But as a metaphor for the story as a whole? Yeah, it works.

Visit Sam Peters's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mind of a Killer"

Simon Beaufort is the pseudonym of Susanna Gregory and Beau Riffenburgh when they write jointly.

Beaufort applied the Page 69 Test to Mind of A Killer and reported the following:

Page 69 of Mind of a Killer doesn’t reveal any dark secrets, but it does grab the essence of one of the book’s subplots.

The story takes place in London in 1882, when Alec Lonsdale, a junior reporter for The Pall Mall Gazette, begins to suspect there was more to a fatal house fire than a simple accident. Slowly, he becomes convinced that the victim was murdered and the house set ablaze to hide the fact. He and his colleague Hulda Friederichs investigate, and uncover a series of seemingly related murders. From the fashionable mansions of Bloomsbury to the dank lanes in Bermondsey that even the police won’t enter, the pair seek answers to give them a sensational story and help build their reputations.

Lonsdale and Hulda do this despite the police trying to suppress the investigation, and having to overcome roadblocks from another alarming place: their own editor. But were the editor’s reservations about the story actually a surprise?

At the time, The Pall Mall Gazette was a small, but politically influential, evening newspaper, the editor of which, John Morley (later the government’s Chief Secretary for Ireland), believed that its pages should be reserved for helping readers understand ‘great affairs’, such as the ‘Irish question’. Inexplicably, Morley had hired as his assistant editor the liberal firebrand W.T. Stead, who later helped bring American-style sensationalism to the British press.

Page 69 shows the interplay between Morley, who thinks a murder investigation lowers the tone of his newspaper, and Stead, who sees the investigation as part of The PMG’s moral obligation. In the middle of this debate are the dedicated Lonsdale and the impetuous Hulda, trying to put forward their points of view. Will Stead convince the editor to approve the investigation, will the pair be reassigned to write theatre reviews, or will Lonsdale have to result to nefarious means to follow the trail of a killer?

Visit Simon Beaufort's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Saint of Wolves and Butchers"

Alex Grecian is the national bestselling author of the contemporary thriller The Saint of Wolves and Butchers, the novels of Scotland Yard’s Murder Squad, including The Yard, The Black Country, The Devil’s Workshop, The Harvest Man, and Lost and Gone Forever, as well as the critically acclaimed graphic novels Proof and Rasputin.

Grecian applied the Page 69 Test to The Saint of Wolves and Butchers and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Saint of Wolves and Butchers comes in the middle of a letter Ruth Elder has written to her adult daughter. Ruth started her life over after World War II, but she recently spotted a man she’s convinced is a former Nazi named Rudolph Bormann, and she’s concerned that her life may be in jeopardy.

I did not tell the men I worked for that I was a trained nurse. I could not bear anymore to see men who were wounded and dying. I feared I would see Dierk when I looked at an injured soldier. But I did well in my secretarial duties and was put into the guard training program at Ravensbrück, in the north of Germany. I did not know what that place was when I was assigned there, but I soon discovered what kind of camp it was.

The prisoners were almost all women, and so the guards were women, too. The administrators were men, of course, but interactions with prisoners were mostly left to us. There were female guards at other camps, but all of us went first to Ravensbrück. We were shown how to subjugate and terrify. We were given dogs and taught the commands that would make our dogs attack prisoners.

We were not taught any command to make the dogs stop attacking.

There are four main characters in this book, and none of them is featured here, but I still think this is pretty representative. Here we see how the past and present are intertwined, and how we’re powerless to escape history, an important theme throughout the novel.

Ruth’s letter is being read aloud to Travis Roan, a Nazi hunter who has travelled to Kansas to meet with Ruth, but has arrived too late. So he believes the letter is the only remaining key to help him find Bormann and bring him to justice. Ruth’s story motivates others, too, including Skottie Foster. She’s a state trooper, who is there to keep an eye on Travis, but she’s touched and disturbed by the letter. She agrees to help Travis, which ends up putting her family in harm’s way and ultimately pushes her to make some life-changing decisions.

Visit Alex Grecian's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Devil's Workshop.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Death Comes in through the Kitchen"

Teresa Dovalpage was born in Havana, Cuba, in 1966. She earned her BA in English literature and an MA in Spanish literature at the University of Havana, and her PhD in Latin American literature at the University of New Mexico. She is the author of twelve other works of fiction and three plays, and is the winner of the Rincón de la Victoria Award and a finalist for the Herralde Award.

Dovalpage applied the Page 69 Test to her new book, Death Comes in through the Kitchen, and reported the following:

On page 69 Matt is talking to Yarmila’s best friend, an enterprising cook named Isabel. Isabel owns a paladar –a small private restaurant located in her house. When she finds out that Matt is looking for a place to stay, she quickly offers him one:

“We have a room,” she explained, turning to Matt. “Small but recently painted and renovated, with its own bathroom and everything. Eh, viejo?” she prompted her husband. “Tell him.”

Despite being called an old man, Luis smiled pleasantly and said, “Yes, it is a penthouse. It has the best views in Havana.”

The page is representative of the book in the sense that Matt, a well-intentioned, naïve American, is led to believe something that turns out to be false. A few paragraphs later, when he gets to see the room, Matt realizes that calling it “a penthouse” is quite an overstatement. This sets the tone for his entire Cuban experience.

On page 69 there is also a mention of food:

Luis and Padrino had begun to discuss food providers. “The pound of pork costs seven CUCs at the Cuatro Caminos Farmers’ Market,” Luis was saying. “But I’d rather buy it from a guy that brings it to us for eight.”

Food is a theme throughout the book, particularly in Yarmila’s blog, which contains authentic Cuban recipes.

If writing this novel didn’t make me a better writer, it did make a me a better cook. I tried all the recipes before including them. Buen provecho!

Visit Teresa Dovalpage's website.

Writers Read: Teresa Dovalpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Cut You Down"

Cut You Down, the latest novel in Sam Wiebe's series featuring Vancouver PI Dave Wakeland, is garnering rave reviews, including a starred review from Publishers Weekly. He's also the author of Invisible Dead and Last of the Independents, and the editor of the forthcoming Vancouver Noir. Wiebe lives in Vancouver.

He applied the Page 69 Test to Cut You Down and reported the following:

On page 69, Vancouver PI Dave Wakeland and his partner Jeff Chen approach the house of a pair of suburban gangsters, very dangerous men...who live with their parents.

"You bring your gun?"

The question surprised me. Jeff knew I'd bought a pistol last year during another case. He hadn't approved. Our security guards had firearms, and we were both licensed, but guns had never sat easy with Jefferon Chen.

I shook my head and pulled the Maglite out of the passenger's side footwell.

"You gonna swat bullets away with that?"

"We're just asking friendly questions," I told him and myself. "No need for things to escalate."

We stepped onto the ratty welcome mat and I rang the buzzer. Discordant chimes went off inside the house.

Jeff nudged my shoulder and pointed towards his feet. Beneath our shoes the letters on the mat spelled F C RIGH FF. I shifted my right foot and uncovered a K.

"Fuck right off," Jeff said.

The door was opened by an old woman carrying an axe.

Cut You Down involves a search for a college student who disappeared in the midst of a scandal involving millions of dollars. The search takes Wakeland across the Pacific Northwest, encountering people and situations that range from the absurd to the violent. This scene shows both. I'd say Page 69 offers a glimpse at what lies ahead for Wakeland, and represents both his doggedness as a detective, and the case's surprising nature.

Visit Sam Wiebe's website.

My Book, The Movie: Invisible Dead.

The Page 69 Test: Invisible Dead.

Writers Read: Sam Wiebe.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Witchy Winter"

D.J. (“Dave”) Butler grew up in swamps, deserts, and mountains. After messing around for years with the practice of law, he finally got serious and turned to his lifelong passion for storytelling. He now writes adventure stories for readers of all ages, plays guitar, and spends as much time as he can with his family.

Butler applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Witchy Winter, book two in the epic fantasy series Witchy Winter, and reported the following:

From page 69:

He didn’t want to kill the gander. But the bird seemed to be begging him. He rode hard, fighting to keep his eyes open against sudden tears that threatened to blind him.

the goose honked one last time—

it turned its neck to thrust its greased head into Nathaniel’s outstretched palm—

crunch!

Nathaniel slowed and then stopped his horse, looking down in shock at the bird’s head that lay twitching in his cupped hand. “Woden’s beard, I think he did it.” George walked away from Charles toward Nathaniel, reaching up to pull down the other young man’s hand to look inside.

~ thank you.~

“Thank you,” Nathaniel repeated, feeling exhausted.

“Publish the banns.” George snorted as he took the goose’s head. “Jenny’s yours, young Chapel.”

“I guess I’ll be having goose for dinner tomorrow night.” Nathaniel tried to grin big, and a ect the bravado the others seemed to feel. Charles smiled back at him. Nathaniel’s ear tingled, so he rubbed it.

“You know, if you left your ear alone, it might not have swollen up to that ridiculous size,” Landon said.

“It’s not that young Nathaniel’s ear is large.” George grunted, climbing onto his own horse, where he swayed back and forth during the pause in his speech. “It’s that it sticks out sideways. Poor bastard looks like a windmill on his left side.”

“I’d have said an elephant,” Landon suggested.

Page 69 is representative in several ways of the larger book.

We see here the sufferings of Nathaniel, the sick young man who must become a healer if he and his sister are to survive. He is one of the three siblings who are the key characters of the series.

Witchy Winter is a book about America and its peoples, and we see here a couple of features of the Cavalier culture of the Chesapeake: intense pecking order and violent blood sports (this is the climax of a ganderpull).

Magic in the Witchy Winter setting is not some artificial game-influenced system built on colors or metals, but is rooted in real-world magical ideas and practices. Nathaniel's illness is a result of too-much openness to the sounds of the cosmos, including the voices of spirits (which appear in the fragment) and also the music of the spheres (which he hears as cacophony). His healing will ultimately come from shamanic initiation.

Visit D.J. Butler's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Whispers of the Dead"

Spencer Kope is the Crime Analyst for the Whatcom County Sheriff's Office. Currently assigned to Detectives Division, he provides case support to detectives and deputies, and is particularly good at identifying possible suspects. In his spare time he developed a database-driven analytical process called Forensic Vehicle Analysis (FVA) used to identify the make, model and year range of vehicles from surveillance photos. It's a tool he's used repeatedly to solve crimes. One of his favorite pastimes is getting lost in a bookstore, and he lives in Washington State.

Kope applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Whispers of the Dead, and reported the following:

Oh, a lot of fun things happen in the first 69 pages of Whispers of the Dead. After solving a brutal murder in the first chapter, the FBI’s elite Special Tracking Unit finds itself in El Paso, Texas, where Special Agent Jimmy Donovan and his partner, Magnus “Steps” Craig, are expected to unravel the story behind a rather peculiar find.

It seems someone doesn’t like Judge Jonathan Ehrlich. This is not surprising to those who know the judge, but then no one has ever expressed their displeasure by leaving a pair of severed feet on the judge’s living room floor. To sort out who might be targeting the judge, Steps and Jimmy must first figure out who the feet belong to.

What they can never reveal, not even to Diane Parker, the team’s top-tier intelligence analyst, is that Steps is a fraud. Oh, he can track like no one else in the world, but he doesn’t use traditional man-tracking methods.

When Steps was eight years old, he got lost in the Cascade Mountains and was clinically dead from hypothermia by the time they found him. After he was revived, he found that his eyes didn’t work like they used to. He could see what some might call the human aura, something he came to call “shine.” The interesting thing about shine is that it’s like DNA or fingerprints: no two are alike. It also attaches itself to everything one touches, which means Steps can walk onto a crime scene and see who walked across the floor, who turned the doorknob, and who held the knife.

The only problem is trying to figure out who the shine belongs to.

By Page 69 of Whispers of the Dead, Steps knows that the suspect, already dubbed the Ice Box Killer, has an ice blue shine. The team is also one computer search away from identifying the first victim ... and that’s about the time the next shoe drops ... so to speak.

Visit Spencer Kope's website.

Writers Read: Spencer Kope.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Death of No Importance"

Mariah Fredericks was born and raised in New York City, where she still lives today with her family. She is a graduate of Vassar College with a BA in history. She has written several novels for young adults; her novel Crunch Time was nominated for an Edgar in 2007.

Fredericks applied the Page 69 Test to A Death of No Importance, her first mystery for adults, and reported the following:

“Page 69? That’s kind of random.”

When I first heard of the Page 69 Test, I worried that just picking a page—any page—in the book was going to reveal a stretch where the story has ground to a halt. Characters are wandering around, staring off into space, muttering about the weather. Maybe you can get away with that in other, lesser genres like literary fiction. But not a mystery.

But I steeled myself and opened to page 69 of A Death of No Importance. What I found was an argument between two maids—and a turning point for my narrator.

It is the morning after the murder. The Benchley family has returned from the Newsome Ball shattered because Charlotte Benchley’s fiancé has been found bludgeoned to death. Our narrator, lady’s maid Jane Prescott, is spending a dismal morning caring for distraught Benchleys and she is furious to find that Charlotte’s ball gown is missing. She vents her frustration on a younger maid, only to find that the dress did not come home for a very curious reason. One question leads to the next until Jane realizes that what seemed like negligence on the part of a inexperienced co-worker could be something altogether more sinister.

It’s the first time Jane starts to critically analyze the events of the night of the murder. “If X did Y, that could mean Z is true.” It marks the starting point of her transformation from a servant who performs any task asked of her without complaint to a woman who reserves the right to ask questions and draw conclusions. A woman who feels her analysis and conclusions matter.

In short, she has started to become a detective.

Visit Mariah Fredericks's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Girl in the Park.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome"

Man Martin writes and teaches in Atlanta, Georgia. He has been twice named Georgia Author of the Year.

Martin applied the Page 69 Test to his latest novel, The Lemon Jell-O Syndrome, and reported the following:

From page 69:

“For obvious reasons, I can’t divulge the actual names of my patients. Suffice to say, Y’s problem is very real, and by no means untypical. Y was a successful car salesman, a decent person. Wife and family. Deacon at the Baptist Church. Whole nine yards. Got it?” Bone said he got it. “So anyway, one day Y disappears. Vanishes. They put in a missing-person report, checked the morgue, the hospitals, the works. Nada. No one knows what happened. But then one day, what do you think?” Bone did not know what to think. “Someone recognizes him! He’s living in a different town! He has a different name, a new job, he’s even got himself a girlfriend. So anyway, they tried reuniting him with his family. Y tried. He moved back in with his wife. He slept with her. Helped with the dishes. Called her “Sugar Boo.” But it didn’t come back; he never remembered his old life. His wife says he was like a whole ‘nother person after he returned. It’s like he never really came back at all. The fact is, Y no longer exists. His body is still there, nothing wrong with the body, only now there’s a whole ‘nother person inside it. As far as Y himself is concerned, or the man who used to be Y, there’s no such person as Y. To this day, Y has not come back, and the man who used to be Y will swear on a stack of Bibles he doesn’t know him.”

This passage not only represents the rest of the the book; in a way, it is the book, for it describes the syndrome which gives the book its title. Dr. Limongello, pronounced Lemon Jell-O, tells his patient, Bone King, of a mysterious syndrome which has become increasingly, alarmingly, common, threatening to become an epidemic - a terrifying condition in which the “self,” the soul if you will, dislodges from the reticular formation in the brain and floats away forever.

At this juncture, an eerie “moo-ha-ha” seems called for, so I shall provide one.

Moo-ha-ha.

Visit Man Martin's website and blog.

Coffee with a Canine: Man Martin and Zoe.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Lord of the Pies"

An avid foodie and writer, Nell Hampton (AKA Nancy J. Parra) decided to finally combine her two loves. She lives in Richmond, VA.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Lord of the Pies, and reported the following:

From page 69:

“But I thought they ate lemon pie,” Agnes scrolled through several pictures. “See? Here’s a lovely piece with sky-high meringue.”

“Wait, yes, that is my pie. There’s two pieces missing out of it.” I frowned. “How was there a whole lemon pie left? I thought it was in one of our pie plates. It looked like my pie. Well, I assumed it was mine since mine were the only pies in the kitchen when I arrived.”

“Do you think someone slipped a poison pie in with yours?”

“Why?”

“Well, if people got sick they would certainly say that on their social media.”

“And everyone would get the impression that I’m a terrible cook,” I said. “If that’s the case, we’re lucky no one else ate that pie.”

“Did you count all the pie plates when you got back?”

“No,” I said. “Why would I? Mine were the only pies served. I didn’t think I needed to check the inventory.”

“You should count them,” she said.

“I’ll do it after lunch service. I have to assume one is missing because CID identified the pie as being in a pie pan from my kitchen.”

Lunch for the family consisted of several courses, to teach the children about official dining. We kept it simple with stuffed mushroom appetizers, potato and chive soup, roasted chicken, and rice pilaf, then pudding for dessert. Well, in England dessert was pudding so they had pudding for pudding. The thought made me smile.

By the time Agnes got back from taking lunch up to the family, I had done a quick inventory of my pie pans. Two seemed to be missing.

Page 69 has our sleuth wondering how one of her pies had become poisoned and why someone might be trying to frame her. It’s a great little peek into daily life and gives a hint of what it’s like for the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge’s children. Carrie Ann is an American in the royal kitchen and takes delight in the things that are different from life as an American chef. Things like pudding for pudding.

That was a fun exercise as I had never looked at a random page to see how it fit into the theme of the book.

Visit Nell Hampton / Nancy J. Parra's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

Coffee with a Canine: Nancy J. Parra and Little Dog.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Devils Unto Dust"

Emma Berquist grew up in Austin, Texas and sunburns easily. She currently lives in New Zealand and avoids the beach.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Devils Unto Dust, and reported the following:

From page 69:

The heat hits me like a solid wall when I step out into the sunshine. I breathe in the scorching air and the heat sears my lungs, clearing out the smoke and noise from the bar. I don’t know how folk can stand to live in there, crammed together with no space to think.

This is the beginning of a chapter where Willie escapes a crowded bar and starts on her way back home. Growing up in a small town in the middle of a desert, she’s not comfortable being in small spaces with lots of people. (In this instance, her inner monologue would probably match my own thoughts!) It’s not just the crowd that makes her uneasy, though, it’s the fact that Willie has trouble trusting anyone but her closest friends and family. It’s doubly a relief for her to get out of that situation and be alone with the one person she trusts the most.

Page 69 is fairly indicative of the rest of the book; Willie is introspective, and we spend a good amount of time in her head.

Visit Emma Berquist's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Just Between Us"

Rebecca Drake is the author of the novels Don't Be Afraid, The Next Killing, The Dead Place, which was an IMBA bestseller, and Only Ever You, as well as the short story "Loaded," which was featured in Pittsburgh Noir.

Drake applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Just Between Us, and reported the following:

I hadn’t heard of this test before, but it’s interesting, and in this case page 69 is representative of all of Just Between Us and I hope a reader skimming this page would read on. It happens to fall on the opening of a chapter, and right after a big reveal, and it really epitomizes what the book is about—the friendship between four women and their concern for one of them:

There are certain moments in life that you can remember with all the clarity of a photograph—where you were and who were with and how the place looked or sounded or smelled. I can see us just as we were, the four of us sitting in Alison’s living room, Heather hunched over on the sofa, hands cradling her midsection as if holding a child, Julie in the chair closest to her, unconsciously tearing a napkin to shreds in her lap, and Alison, so startled that she’d stopped talking, her mouth falling open. Everyone so shocked by what Heather had revealed that for a long minute the only noise you could hear in the room was the faint hiss and pop of logs burning in the fireplace. These are the things I remember with perfect clarity: The slight smell of woodsmoke, the taste of cabernet, dark and dry, the table lamps casting shadows on the walls. The light from the fire illuminating the wine as I refilled my glass, a gush of liquid splashing, deep red, like blood pouring from a wound.

I wanted to explore female friendship, and how women communicate with and about one another. The book is told in four, first-person POVs, with each of the women—Alison, Julie, Sarah, and Heather—taking turns discussing what happens after they discover that Heather is being abused by her husband. It was challenging to write in four different points-of-view, because I wanted to make each character distinct, but also make sure that they had some shared vocabulary, the way we do with those closest to us. In order to avoid any confusion for readers, I asked my publisher to put the character’s name as a header on each page in their individual chapters. So page 69 falls on the opening of a Sarah chapter, and if readers forget that, they only have to glance up to remember who’s speaking. The unspoken question on this page and throughout the entire book is this: How far would you go to help a friend?

Visit Rebecca Drake's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Magnificent Esme Wells"

Adrienne Sharp is the critically acclaimed author of the story collection White Swan, Black Swan, a Barnes & Noble Discover Book and a national bestseller; and the novels The Sleeping Beauty, named one of Booklist’s ten best first novels of 2005; and The True Memoirs of Little K, which was a finalist for the California Book Award and a Historical Novel Review Editors’ Choice.

Sharp applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Magnificent Esme Wells, and reported the following:

When Bugsy Siegel’s Flamingo Club was closed down by order of the mob in early 1947 because it was hemorrhaging money, Meyer Lansky himself came out to Las Vegas to find out what the hell was going on. On page 69, Lansky and a fictional associate I created for him, Nate Stein (handsome, Roman nose, big head of black hair), watch a rehearsal of the floorshow in the shuttered nightclub. No detail of the property or its activities was too small for their inspection. While the Andrews Sisters croon “Near You,” my main character, Esme, fifteen years old and one of the Flamingo dancers in her red high-heeled shoes and pink feathers, finds Nate looking at her, looking away, looking back. He’s fifty. And after rehearsal, at Nate’s instigation, Ben Siegel reluctantly introduces Nate to Esme. She can tell he’s not happy about doing this “because I was Benny’s Baby E and Nate was staring at me in this certain way and Ben could see what lay ahead and he didn’t like it.” Esme shakes Nate’s hand and tells him her name, her stage name, first time she’s used it, Esme Wells. He laughs. “He knew exactly who I was, Esme Silver, fifteen years old, practically unschooled, a nobody, but he understood my affectation, even approved of it. All these men approved of ambition, of reinvention.”

Which is, I suppose, the theme of the book—reinvention. Esme’s mother is girl from Boyle Heights who took a few dance classes at Daddy Mack’s studio and became a Busby Berkeley girl in a blond wig and shoes with satin bows and a chiffon dress. Esme’s father is a bookie who haunts the parking lot of the Hollywood Park race track and now works as a gofer for Mickey Cohen and Ben Siegel. First in Los Angeles and then, later in the book, in Las Vegas. Reinvention. The men who made their money in scrap metal, rags, and nickelodeon houses at the turn of the twentieth century are the men who created Hollywood—Goldwyn, Mayer, Lasky, Fox, Warner. And the men who made their money in the Midwest during Prohibition are the men who opened casinos in Las Vegas in the thirties and forties, places like the Desert Inn, the Dunes, the Stardust, the Flamingo.

The Flamingo itself, like all of those other hotels before their demolition, has been reinvented many times—currently it’s a hodge-podge neon nightmare, but in 1947, it was a beautiful place, a glass-backed bar filled with liquor bottles, the ceiling a pocked gorgeous blue-green like some magnificent moon, and a marble spiral staircase. The casinos back then were small, with a just a few tables and slot machines, and the hotels themselves were long and low, the old school motels where you pulled your car up to your room. The pool out back was spotted with pink-painted fake flamingoes. The real ones Siegel imported had died in the desert heat. So, reinvention with plastic and steel.

Siegel’s reinvention as a casino magnate was short-lived. He was murdered a few months after Lansky’s visit to Vegas.

But for Esme, that visit is the catalyst for her own personal reinvention—with her stage name, with her promotion from cigarette girl to show girl, and with her introduction to Nate Stein. She moves from soundstage rat cloaked in her mother’s jewelry--a little girl so neglected she barely attends school and suffers from impetigo from lack of bathing, a little girl women everywhere take under their wings to wash her face or to comb the snarls from her hair-- is now about to become the mistress of one of the most important men in Las Vegas and through him a headliner on the Strip. But for now she’s dressed “like a piece of candy in a candy-colored costume, my face orange with Pan-Cake and my lashes an elongated black, my hair as long as a child’s.”

Half girl, half woman, and page 69 is her pivot, the moment she makes the transition from one thing to the other, from girlhood to womanhood, from powerlessness to a certain kind of power, adulthood with all its treacherous pleasures. She recognizes this herself. “One day you were a child and then, all at once, you weren’t.”

Learn more about The Magnificent Esme Wells.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Fairies of Sadieville"

Alex Bledsoe grew up in west Tennessee an hour north of Graceland (home of Elvis) and twenty minutes from Nutbush (birthplace of Tina Turner). He has been a reporter, editor, photographer and door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman. He now lives in a Wisconsin town famous for trolls.

Bledsoe applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Fairies of Sadieville, the sixth book in his Tufa series, and reported the following:

On page 69 of The Fairies of Sadieville, our two protagonists, Justin and Veronica, are driving along a winding rural highway on their way to Cloud County in search of the vanished coal town of Sadieville. They pull over so Justin can pee, and while alone in the car, Veronica ponders her concerns about the trip:

The one thing they hadn’t discussed was the obvious: a Latina and her black boyfriend would certainly stand out. They’d both had their share of experiences with racism, but this was the first time, as a couple, they’d ventured into what they believed was the heartland of it.

Any story set in the contemporary American south, if it’s honest, has to deal with race. It doesn’t have to be the focus, which it isn’t here, but to omit it entirely is, quite frankly, cheating. My fictional Tufa people frequently encounter racism outside their community, so their response to other minorities is filtered through that. Similarly, the important and omnipresence of religion has to be acknowledged, since it permeates so many aspects of southern life. Not that it’s all bad, either in real life or my Tufa novels; sure there are hypocrites, but there are also true believers, like recurring character Craig Chess, a Methodist minister. The important thing is to understand race and religion as part of that society’s foundation, because whether you’re a believer or not, a racist or not, they are inevitably there.

Is page 69 representative of the rest of the book? I hope so. It helps create the reality against which the fantasy elements will appear that much more fantastic. Through this book, and the series as a whole, I’ve attempted to achieve that same balance.

And I certainly hope a reader skimming that page would be inclined to read on, because the last line is:

He slammed into the car. “I saw a dinosaur!” he gasped.

Learn more about the book and author at Alex Bledsoe's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Flicker of Old Dreams"

Susan Henderson is a five-time Pushcart Prize nominee and the recipient of an Academy of American Poets award. She is the author of the novels Up from the Blue (2010) and The Flicker of Old Dreams (2018).

Henderson applied the Page 69 Test to The Flicker of Old Dreams and reported the following:

From page 69:

My father grows quiet. He tries so hard to keep our business afloat, tries every way he knows to keep our customers and potential customers happy.

“He’s a bad memory for this town,” he says, carefully choosing his words. “I think our neighbors will feel relieved the less involved he is.”

“We have to do what’s right for the customer,” I say.

“We have to do what’s right for the town.”

“I won’t do anything unprofessional, Pop.”

“Let me handle it, then."

This is a scene between father and daughter, funeral director and embalmer. I don't think it's representative of the book because so much of the story is about death--the death of this small town and the death of a way of life, as well as the dead bodies moving in and out of the funeral home. This scene, however, touches on the trouble that's brewing between Mary and her father now that a former and long-hated resident of this small town has come back to bury his mother.

Learn more about the book and author at Susan Henderson's website.

The Page 69 Test: Up From the Blue.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bluff"

Michael Kardos is the author of the novels Bluff, Before He Finds Her, and The Three-Day Affair, an Esquire best book of 2012, as well as the story collection One Last Good Time, which won the Mississippi Institute of Arts & Letters Award for fiction, and the textbook The Art and Craft of Fiction: A Writer’s Guide.

Kardos applied the Page 69 Test to Bluff and reported the following:

From page 69:

The air was gustier than it was up north, and I wrapped my arms around myself as Ace and I crossed the street. You couldn’t see inside the bakery because of the shelves of bread blocking the windows. The sign on the door said closed, but the door was unlocked.

Ace gently touched my arm. “If you win a hand, don’t lay your cards down extra slow to rub it in. It’s bad etiquette.”

“Slow rolling. I know.”

“And protect your cards. Not everyone’s as honest as you and me.”

I smiled.

“Let’s go get ’em, tiger,” he said, and we went in.

On page 69 of Bluff, the novel’s protagonist, Natalie Webb, is accompanying a professional card cheat named Ace into an Atlantic City bakery, the setting of the novel’s first of two key poker games. Natalie, a world-class sleight-of-hand magician, is there to observe Ace’s technique: she plans to write a magazine article comparing the techniques and artistry of magicians and cardsharps. But to ensure his cover isn’t blown, Ace has insisted that Natalie can’t simply watch the game and take notes: she must sit at the table, put up her own hard-earned money, and play.

Will everything go as planned? (Spoiler alert: No.)

Learn more about the book and author at Michael Kardos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Italian Party"

Christina Lynch’s picaresque journey includes chapters in Chicago and at Harvard, where she was an editor on the Harvard Lampoon. She was the Milan correspondent for W magazine and Women’s Wear Daily, and disappeared for four years in Tuscany. In L.A. she was on the writing staff of Unhappily Ever After; Encore, Encore; The Dead Zone and Wildfire. She now lives in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.

Lynch is the co-author of two novels under the pen name Magnus Flyte. She teaches at College of the Sequoias.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Italian Party, her debut novel, and reported the following:

Wow—it’s kind of crazy how well this works! Page 69 in The Italian Party is a page that might deter some readers, because it’s a Michael page (instead of a section from the point of view of his wife, Scottie) where he’s realizing how much he doesn’t understand about Italian politics, and feeling frustrated about how to even begin the mission he’s been sent to do, to throw an election. (An aside: when I started writing this novel in 2013, no one was talking about throwing elections! I’m amazed that the things I dreamed up for Michael to do are things that people who want to throw elections apparently actually do.) Page 69 is a pivotal page in Michael’s story, and sets up everything that comes later. Michael is trying to figure out how to flip a reporter who is writing negative stories about America, “ridiculing its films as treacle, its products as flimsy and its presence in Europe as imperialist.” He knows he has to get to that guy and get him to change his tune. He’s also thinking about the news that Khrushchev has just denounced Stalin: “What did it mean, the papers kept asking, and everyone had a contradictory answer. Some said it was the beginning of a loosening of Soviet control over the Eastern Bloc. Others said it was a consolidation of power in new hands. Things had begun to shift and change in ways that Michael found unnerving. It felt to him like the entire world was having a migraine.” Michael’s Cold War anxiety is growing, and then at the bottom of the page he gets even more bad news, that the Communist mayor of Siena is predicted to win reelection. That fact is a low point in his story that drives him to take actions that have many repercussions…

Visit Christina Lynch's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Italian Party.

--Marshal Zeringue

"High White Sun"

J. Todd Scott was born in rural Kentucky and attended college and law school in Virginia, where he set aside an early ambition to write to pursue a career as a federal agent. His assignments have taken him all over the U.S and the world, but a badge and gun never replaced his passion for books and writing. He now resides in the American Southwest, and when he’s not hunting down very bad men, he’s hard at work on his next book.

His debut novel, The Far Empty, was published in 2016.

Scott applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, High White Sun, and reported the following:

One of the themes of High White Sun, and really, the whole series, is how Sheriff Chris Cherry struggles with the authority and responsibility that’s been thrust upon him. This plays out over page 69, which is the culmination of an on-going argument between Chris and county attorney Royal Moody over Chris’s handling of the murder investigation that kicks off the novel; in fact, it’s emblematic of a deeper disagreement over Chris’s fitness to wear a badge and carry a gun. Chris had zero law enforcement experience before becoming a deputy, and now, sheriff, and if a football injury hadn’t derailed his college plans and possible pro career, he never would have returned home to Murfee, Texas. Living in the shadow of the venerated (but corrupt) former sheriff, Stanford “Judge” Ross, Chris only wants to uphold the law and modernize the Big Bend County Sheriff’s Department. It’s a noble ambition, but with very little support from the community, and threats seemingly everywhere, it’s one he’s afraid he’ll never fully realize.

High White Sun is a big, brawling, violent book, and although this scene is one of the “quieter” ones, it’s powerful because it shows that not all of Chris’s enemies carry guns, and not all of his troubles lurk in the desert surrounding Murfee.

Visit J. Todd Scott's website.

--Marshal Zeringue