For fourteen years she served as the editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine, and though she loved the job (and all the freebies to be found in the Cosmo beauty closet!), she decided to leave eight years ago to concentrate full time on being a suspense author.
White applied the Page 69 Test to Have You Seen Me? and reported the following:
Page 69, excerpt:Visit Kate White's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.
As the Uber driver zigzags west and north toward the Central Park–Seventy-Ninth Street transverse, I realize I feel even more wired than I did before the session. Jittery, unable to stop gnawing on my thumb. Or keep a zillion questions from ricocheting in my head.I have to say that page 69 of Have You Seen Me? would definitely give a casual browser a good sense of what my thriller is all about and hopefully make them want to read it.
My agitation, I realize, is due in part to my returning home empty-handed. On some level I’d allowed myself to believe that the session today would be a magic bullet, kick-starting my memory. But as Erling stressed, it might take time for memories to be recovered. Did she mean days? I wonder. Or weeks? I can’t stand the thought of being in the dark for so long.
There’s something else eating at me, too. The memory of Jaycee Long refuses to loosen its grip on me.
It’s not as if I didn’t obtain all the help I needed at the time. I had six months’ worth of weekly sessions with a child psychologist, an intent listener who for some reason always wore a shawl pinned around the shoulders of her blazer.
And it wasn’t as if the bad thing had really happened to me. I was simply a bystander, a nine-year-old who took a shortcut….
The book opens on a cold, rainy morning with Ally Linden arriving at her office soaked to the bone, only to realize she’s forgotten her key card and needs someone to let her in. When her boss shows up a short time later, he’s shocked to see her because, he explains, she hasn’t worked at the company in five years. Ally has no idea why she’s there.
During a trip to the psychiatric ER, Ally learns she’s been in a “dissociative” fugue state, and though some of her memory soon returns, she's still missing two whole days. As she tries frantically to figure out where she’s been, it becomes more and more clear that something terrible happened in those forty-eight hours--and someone will stop at nothing to make sure she doesn’t learn the truth.
Page 69 of my book lets the browser see how desperate Ally is to regain her memory of those missing days, and how frustrated she feels that even the appointment she just had with a therapist yielded no clues.
It also introduces a detail that’s only been hinted at until now. That Ally is still haunted by an experience she had when she was nine: finding the body of a murdered two-year old girl named Jaycee Long.
As the book progresses from this point, and as Ally searches for the truth, both Ally and the reader will begin to wonder if what happened to her during the missing two days is connected in some unknown way to her shocking experience as a child.
--Marshal Zeringue
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