"The Wild Dead"

Carrie Vaughn is the New York Time bestselling author of more than twenty novels and over eighty short stories.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Wild Dead, and reported the following:

The Wild Dead is a post-apocalyptic murder mystery, the sequel to my Philip K. Dick Award-Winning novel Bannerless that came out last year. Page 69 of The Wild Dead is an odd one, in that it’s only a quarter of a page of text, right at the end of a chapter. In it, what little there is of it, my main character, Investigator Enid, and her partner Teeg are having to stop their investigation for the night, and continue the next day to hunt for the killer of a young woman whose body washed up on the. On the one hand it’s mostly movement, logistics that move the story from one scene to the next. At the same time, I do think it’s representative – this is a murder mystery, even against the backdrop of the unfamiliar post-apocalyptic setting, and this is one of those classic murder mystery scenes in which the detective is explaining her thoughts, listing out clues, giving her take on the setting. I think this is one of the attractions of the murder mystery genre, both written and on TV, particularly series in which we follow the same investigator from one case to the next, and we get to see the world through her perspective.

Learn more about the author and her work at Carrie Vaughn's website and Facebook page.

--Marshal Zeringue