"The Heart of War"

Kathleen J. McInnis is a U.S. national security policy geek by trade, who happens to be moonlighting as a novelist. Or maybe it's the other way around?

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Heart of War: Misadventures in the Pentagon, and reported the following:

There’s actually an easily-overlooked but critically important plot point on page 69 of The Heart of War. The two main characters, Dr. Heather Reilly and Colonel Tom Voight are discussing the bureaucratic state of play inside the national security community when it comes to advancing their boss-from-hell’s Ariane Fletcher’s Moldova initiative. Not only do they discuss how they’re planning on outmaneuvering the National Security Council, Voight lets it slip that he made a deal with Fletcher: he’ll take a trip to Europe (which sounds great in theory, but in reality would be a nightmare) as long as he and Heather are allowed to be teammates. And, for a variety of reasons, the stakes for Voight in taking the trip are pretty high. Not only is it where Heather and Voight begin their transition from colleagues to dear friends, page 69 shows the craziness of the DOD bureaucracy and the need to make human connections within it to survive.

Visit Kathleen J. McInnis's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Heart of War.

--Marshal Zeringue