"The Penmaker's Wife"

Steve Robinson is a London-based crime writer. He was sixteen when his first magazine article was published and he’s been writing ever since. A love for genealogy inspired his first bestselling series, the Jefferson Tayte Genealogical Mysteries, and he is now expanding his writing to historical crime, another area he is passionate about.

Robinson applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Penmaker's Wife, and reported the following:

I think page sixty-nine of The Penmaker’s Wife (my eighth published book to date) is very representative of the rest of the story. I can’t share much of it with you, unfortunately, because it contains some pretty big spoilers. Angelica Chastain is the lead character, and here we see her dark side for the first time, which is something that builds throughout the remainder of the book. On page sixty-nine Angelica is telling her confidante what she did in London before she fled to Birmingham with her young son, William, and about some of the terrible things she’s done since as she set out to make a better life for him. While some dark deeds are revealed on page sixty-nine, however, I wanted the reader to feel some sympathy for Angelica, rather than condemning her for her actions, asking what he or she would have done in her situation, which was very dire indeed. Page sixty-nine is also part of a section that reveals a big twist, of which The Penmaker’s Wife has many.

Here’s how the page ends:

‘You see,’ Angelica said, ‘I’m a monster, and I’m sorry I lied to you before, but how could I have told you all this when we first met? You would not have wished to know me then.’

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Writers Read: Steve Robinson.

My Book, The Movie: The Penmaker's Wife.

--Marshal Zeringue