"A Deadly Turn"

Claire Booth is a former true crime writer, ghostwriter, and reporter. She lives in California. Her Sheriff Hank Worth Mysteries include The Branson Beauty and Another Man's Ground.

Booth applied the Page 69 Test to the third book in the series, A Deadly Turn, and reported the following:

From page 69:

He fished through his notes and found the emergency notification phone number that the high school had on file for Johnny. There’d been no landline listed, just a single local cell number. He dialed, and it went straight to voice mail. Probably because it was currently sealed in an evidence bag.

Yo, this is Johnny. Leave me a message. If you’re lucky, I’ll hit you back.

Hank was not in the mood to think about luck. He shut the laptop with a smack just as Maggie came in from the garage. He was starting to tell her about Aunt Fin setting up camp in Maribel’s room when she collapsed in a chair across the table from him. He shut his mouth. This did not appear to be the right time. She looked like she could fall asleep right there.

“Babe, good grief,” he said. “What happened?”

She laid her head on the table. He knew that sign. She rarely ate when she was on shift, and now—nine hours after she was originally supposed to be finished—she was crashing. He rushed to the fridge and pulled out the eggs and cheese. Once he got the omelet going, the smell perked her up enough for her to raise her head.

“It was just an ordinary broken leg. I was in the middle of it and Ed was late, so I stayed to finish it. And then a trauma came in. Teenager. A fall. From at least twenty feet. So many broken bones. Protruding left tibia. Shattered left wrist. The only good thing is that it doesn’t look like she hit her head too badly. We were in surgery for … I don’t even know.”

This page really is representative of the rest of the book. Johnny was one of the teenagers involved in the deadly crash, and Sheriff Hank Worth is trying to find out more about him and growing more and more suspicious as he investigates. At the same time, Hank has to deal with several family problems, including the unexpected arrival of his wife’s Aunt Fin. The tension between these two things runs throughout the novel, and page 69 gives a very good snapshot of that.

Visit Claire Booth's website.

My Book, The Movie: Another Man's Ground.

The Page 69 Test: Another Man's Ground.

My Book, The Movie: A Deadly Turn.

--Marshal Zeringue