"Gravesend" and "The Lonely Witness"

William Boyle is from Brooklyn, New York. His debut novel, Gravesend, was published as #1,000 in the Rivages/Noir collection in France, where it was nominated for the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière. Gravesend is currently shortlisted for the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger in the UK and will be reissued by Pegasus Crime in the US in September 2018. Boyle is also the author of a book of short stories, Death Don’t Have No Mercy, and of another novel, Tout est Brisé (Everything is Broken). His most recent novel, The Lonely Witness, is out now from Pegasus Crime. A new novel, A Friend is a Gift You Give Yourself, is forthcoming in March 2019. He lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Boyle applied the Page 69 Test to Gravesend and to The Lonely Witness, and reported the following:

From page 69 in Gravesend:

A nurse had said, “You glad you’re alive?”

“Not really,” he’d said.

From page 69 in The Lonely Witness:

The car arrives ten minutes later. They go downstairs, Amy holding Diane’s arm as they take the steps one by one. Diane seems more fragile by the moment. The car is almost identical to the one Amy caught at the diner, except I DID IT “MY WAY” is stenciled on the door in yellow letters. Amy helps Diane in.

Both of these excerpts, even totally out of context, feel representative of the overall mood of each book—a haunted memory in Gravesend, a fragile and traumatic encounter that’s actually something else altogether in The Lonely Witness. There’s the feeling of doom and uncertainty, the feeling that things can and will unravel soon.

Visit William Boyle's website.

My Book, The Movie: Gravesend and The Lonely Witness.

--Marshal Zeringue