, with Honors in English literature, and she received her law degree from the University of the Pennsylvania Law School, where she was a moot court champion and legal writing instructor.
She spent her law career in private practice with major law firms. Peer-rated as Distinguished for both legal ability and ethical standards, she successfully tried cases in federal and state courts across the country.
She and her husband now live in Florida and the mountains of western North Carolina.
Kistler applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Her, Too, and reported the following:
Page 69 of Her, Too contains the following passage:Visit Bonnie Kistler's website.She wanted to kill him. She never would have guessed that murder lurked in her heart, but there it was, pumping its black blood through her veins. She wanted to stab him through his gimlet eyeballs and bore like a jackhammer into his genius brain.The Page 69 Test actually works! This is a pivotal scene in the novel––literally!––as Kelly McCann paces and pivots and debates what she must do.
But she couldn’t kill him. That was too blunt, too risky, it would end his suffering too soon. There had to be other ways. There really were fates worse than death. She simply had to find the right one for Benedict.
She pivoted and paced.
It would be poetic justice if he were raped. Sodomized. Brutally. She knew people who knew people. A career spent in the criminal justice system introduced her to a lot of unsavory characters. She could hire one of them to do it.
But again, too risky. The trail would inevitably lead back to her.
She pivoted again.
What she needed was a more devious way to humiliate him. A way to destroy his reputation and his income without destroying her own in the process.
She’s a lawyer who specializes in representing men accused of sex crimes. She defends them at trial when it goes that far, though it usually doesn’t. Whenever she gets that late night call – “Um, there’s this woman?” – she swoops in with her client’s check in one hand and a non-disclosure agreement in the other. She’s effectively silenced all the victims.
The tables are turned when she herself is brutally raped by her own client. She can’t go to the police without destroying her own career in the process, and without hurting all the people who are financially dependent upon her. So she’s been effectively silenced, too.
She tries to forget and move on, but her trauma manifests as rage, and it’s volcanic. On Page 69, she realizes that she has to do something. This is the moment she decides that if she can’t seek justice, she’ll seek revenge.
Her decision is the launchpad for the rest of the novel as she devises a plan to ruin her attacker. But she can’t do it alone. She needs the help of his other victims––the same women she’d silenced before and who have no reason to trust her.
The women finally come together to scheme to bring him down. But someone else is out to silence them all – permanently.
Her, Too is a new twist on the #MeToo novel. It considers the degree to which women themselves might enable sexual predators – by representing them as lawyers; by selling their silence as victims; and even by what they do (or fail to do) as wives and girlfriends and mothers.
Q&A with Bonnie Kistler.
The Page 69 Test: The Cage.
--Marshal Zeringue
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