veteran of the Army Reserve with deployments to Kosovo and
Iraq. He is a police officer in a New England City and the married
father of two boys. Colt applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Back Bay Blues, and reported the following:
Page 69 of Back Bay Blues involves the protagonist Andy Roark and his client Thuy interviewing the widow of a murder victim. The interview is an important element of the story because it ties the two victims of two separate murders together. On this page we see that they have known each since they were in school together and during the war. It also gives them the next clue, the next link in the chain of their investigation.Visit Peter Colt's website.I took the time to look at the pictures in the living room. They had the usual pictures of children and family portraits, but in one area was a picture of a young Pham in a Navy uniform. There were others, and then one caught my eye. It showed the same man standing next to a man in a Vietnamese Navy uniform, wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses. They were facing the sun and something glinted on his chest above his ribbons. There was another man in the picture who wasn’t in uniform but was in a Madras shirt and had long hair. The man with the Madras shirt was a young Hieu.Page 69 is a good example of my book and the way I write. One of the themes of the book is the losses that average Vietnamese people incurred in the war. In this case it is the loss of a homeland, a loss of a career, loss of status, all of which highlight the struggle to rebuild again in America. All of the Vietnamese characters in the book, with the exception of Thuy, have had to try and make a new home in America. They have done so with varying degrees of success. Often books and movies, that deal with Vietnam, focus on the losses incurred by Americans that we rarely see any focus on the losses that Vietnamese people had to deal with.
My Book, The Movie: Back Bay Blues.
--Marshal Zeringue