"White Out"

Danielle Girard is the author of Chasing Darkness, The Rookie Club series, and Exhume, Excise, Expose, and Expire, featuring San Francisco medical examiner Dr. Annabelle Schwartzman. Girard’s books have won the Barry Award and the RT Reviewers’ Choice Award, and two of her titles have been optioned for movies.

A graduate of Cornell University, Girard received her MFA at Queens University in Charlotte, North Carolina. She, her husband, and their two children split their time between San Francisco and the Northern Rockies.

Girard applied the Page 69 Test to White Out, book one of her new Badlands Thriller Series, and reported the following:

From page 69:

She stared in through a small living room window. The answers were inside. All she had to do was go in. But she couldn’t shake the fear about who she was. About what she’d done. Why hadn’t she asked Tim about Abby? Or about the name in her Bible? Because she didn’t want anything to do with Tim, with his nicotine-stained teeth and his drugs and his wife and daughter.

She caught sight of the coffee table, glasses and bowls on its surface as though it belonged in a fraternity. This is who you are. Where you live.

She wanted nothing to do with that either.

This is my second go at the page 69 test (my first was with Expose, book 3 of the Annabelle Schwartzman Series). I was surprised back then that Expose’s page 69 fit so well with the overall theme and story… and here I am, surprised again.

On page 69 of White Out we witness our protagonist, Lily Baker, arriving at her own home after a night spent out in the elements, following a car accident. For most of us, home symbolizes not only familiarity but also safety and comfort. For Lily Baker, it is none of these things. Because home is as unfamiliar as everything has been to her since she woke up in that car. Without her memory, Lily Baker is a stranger to herself.

And she’s a stranger that she’s not sure she likes. The things she learns about herself in the hours after the accident make her wonder what kind of person she really is.

A terrible car accident, a gun and a bible in her purse and a memory of a dead man in a pool of blood is all Lily has to go on when she wakes after a car accident. White Out is a thriller about what we are capable of when pushed to the edge… and about being a stranger, even to ourselves.

Visit Danielle Girard's website.

The Page 69 Test: Expose.

--Marshal Zeringue