"Expose"

Danielle Girard is the author of Chasing Darkness, The Rookie Club series, and Exhume and Excise, featuring San Francisco medical examiner Dr. Annabelle Schwartzman. Girard’s books have won the Barry Award and the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award, and two of her titles have been optioned for movies.

A graduate of Cornell University, Girard received her MFA at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. She, her husband, and their two children split their time between San Francisco and the Northern Rockies.

Girard applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, Expose, and reported the following:

The page 69 test -- is it representative of the rest of the book?

Expose is my 12th release and by now, I thought I’d seen every question that could be asked about books. But the “page 69” test was new to me.

As it turns out, page 69 [inset left; click to enlarge] is representative of the book. Medical Examiner Dr. Annabelle Schwartzman is at her best when she is solving the mysteries of how someone died. And on page 69 of Expose, she is doing just that. The victim here, Malik Washington, is a teenage boy found stabbed in a theater. The weapon found at the scene links Washington's death to another death earlier that same day, raising the stakes for the team and increasing the pressure to find the killer.

Here, Schwartzman works the scene with Inspector Hal Harris to draw information from the victim—his stature and strength, his wounds and placement, the cause of death and staging of the body—in order to extract the clues that will lead them to the killer.

Visit Danielle Girard's website.

My Book, The Movie: Expose.

Writers Read: Danielle Girard.

--Marshal Zeringue