Saturday, April 2, 2022

"Dead Wind"

Tessa Wegert is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, The Huffington Post, Adweek, and The Economist. She grew up in Quebec near the border of Vermont and now lives with her husband and children in a hundred- year-old house in Coastal Connecticut. Wegert writes mysteries set in Upstate New York while studying martial arts and dance, and is the author of the Shana Merchant series, beginning with Death in the Family.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Dead Wind, and reported the following:
From page 69:
I was frustrated, and disheartened. Every path was a dead end, each avenue blocked. Homicide cases involving dumped bodies were rarely closed overnight, but something about this one made me leery. Somehow, I felt like I was being played.
While investigating the murder of Hope Oberon, whose body was found next to a wind turbine on a Canadian Island just north of New York State, plainclothes detective Shana Merchant can’t stop thinking about Blake Bram. Bram follows her, both literally and figuratively, throughout this series, and in Dead Wind, Shana believes the serial murderer she’s been hunting for years could well be responsible for the death of a prominent local. As she delves deeper into the homicide, though, Shana discovers that Bram isn’t the potential threat in the quiet Thousand Islands town she now calls home. Dead Wind finds her struggling to suss out the truth both about her community’s buried secrets and the breadth of Bram’s crimes.

Page 69 of Dead Wind plunks readers straight into the action of an active homicide investigation, but it’s also reflective of protagonist Shana Merchant’s addled state of mind and sense of self-doubt. Can she summon the acuity needed to navigate this baffling new case?
Visit Tessa Wegert's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Dead Season.

The Page 69 Test: The Dead Season.

Q&A with Tessa Wegert.

--Marshal Zeringue