"The Bitter Past"

Bruce Borgos lives and writes from the Nevada desert where he works hard every day to prove his high school guidance counselor had good instincts when he said “You’ll never be an astronaut.” He has a degree in political science which mostly served to dissuade him from a career in law while at the same time tormenting his wife with endless questions about how telephones work. When not writing, you can usually find him at the local wine store.

Borgos applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Bitter Past, and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Bitter Past is a great place in the story. Not only a great part, but a great place. We find ourselves in the middle of the hunt for a Russian assassin who has already killed a retired FBI agent and come close to killing the story’s main character, Sheriff Porter Beck, as well as current FBI agent, Sana Locke. The assassin has the high ground in a place called Big Rocks, where the desert rock formations line up like skyscrapers. It’s pre-dawn, and Beck and his team are awaiting first light to begin hunting the hunter. There’s not much chance of the Russian slipping away; he’s surrounded by hundreds of miles of open desert. Beck needs him alive. Sana? Not so much.

A browser opening The Bitter Past to page 69 would actually get a good idea of the story. The main characters are there (with one or two exceptions), Sheriff Porter Beck has figured out (for the most part) why a retired FBI agent has been murdered, and he’s got the murderer surrounded. A browser would get an excellent sense of the book’s setting—the high desert of Eastern Nevada—as well as the obstacles and limitations faced by a rural county sheriff’s department.

One other important snippet a browser would get when opening this book up to page 69 is that Porter Beck has some kind of disability. Porter is musing on this point at the top of the page, in typical self-deprecating style, and it’s enough that I’m certain the reader would immediately jump to the bottom of page 68 to get the full sense of what he deals with on a daily basis. And it’s not an affliction that bodes well for someone in law enforcement. Ultimately, The Bitter Past is a story about duty and sacrifice and asks the question: What makes us who we are? Is it where we’re born or the uniform we put on, or is it something more than that? And in the end, do we have it in us to do what’s right when everything is on the line?

Visit Bruce Borgos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue