"Shrouded Loyalties"

Reese Hogan loves nothing more than creating broken relationships in broken worlds. With a Bachelor’s degree in English and a minor in journalism, Hogan has spent the last twenty years honing her craft by taking classes, listening to podcasts, and attending writing workshops and critique groups. She is passionate about music, especially alternative and punk rock, and believes that art can reach out in a way no other form of communication can. She lives with her family in New Mexico.

Hogan applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Shrouded Loyalties, and reported the following:

Page 69 is a pivotal moment in Shrouded Loyalties—it is the scene referenced on the back when Blackwood and Holland first meet with unscrupulous scientists who want to investigate the strange marks they received on their skin in the submarine accident:

Seeing whether you survive is only the first step. With those words, Blackwood realized the horrible truth. They didn’t care. Despite Doctor Zurlig knowing her as a child, despite everything Blackwood had done for the Belzene military, they were more concerned with using those marks of theirs. Maybe they wanted them to survive—but they didn’t necessarily expect them to. They were more interested in the outcome of the experiment than in keeping either of them alive. And her duty, as an officer in the navy, was to offer up her body to those ends.

As you might expect, this is a huge decision-making moment for Mila Blackwood. She feels responsible for the life of Holland, her subordinate, but also feels loyalty to her government. Her allegiances are being torn in two. This is absolutely representative of the rest of the novel, where loyalties are tested at every turn and characters are forced into decisions without easy answers. And—as you know if you’ve read the back cover copy—her trust in Holland is misplaced, in that he’s actually working for the enemy’s government. So you have the added tension of seeing whether Blackwood will go against her government to unknowingly protect someone who’s trying to harm her country. These layers of deception are intertwined throughout the whole novel, and this page is a great example of this complicated relationship.

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My Book, The Movie: Shrouded Loyalties.

Writers Read: Reese Hogan.

--Marshal Zeringue