"Play of Shadows"

Barbara Nickless is the Wall Street Journal and Amazon Charts bestselling author of At First Light and Dark of Night in the Dr. Evan Wilding series as well as the Sydney Rose Parnell series, which includes Blood on the Tracks, a Suspense Magazine Best of 2016 selection and winner of the Colorado Book Award and the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence; Dead Stop, winner of the Colorado Book Award and nominee for the Daphne du Maurier Award for Excellence; Ambush; and Gone to Darkness.

Nickless applied the Page 69 Test to the third book on the Dr. Evan Wilding series, Play of Shadows, and reported the following:

Page 69 shows the team—forensic semiotician Dr. Evan Wilding, his assistant, Diana, and his brother, River—as they come together to try to solve a riddle left by a serial killer at the crime scene. The riddle is written in an ancient, undeciphered script from the Greek island of Crete. Here’s a brief clip as Evan gets the team organized:

Evan stood. “Now, before we begin analyzing the signs on the victim’s body, let’s assemble our tools. We’ll need drawings of the Cretan hieroglyphs, the Linear B signs and their phonetic values, and symbols from the Phaistos Disc.”

He had all the glyphs memorized from his attempts at deciphering the Phaistos Disc. He could draw the symbols in his sleep. But sometimes there were small variations in the renderings. Better not to take chances.

Did the Page 69 Test work? Yes and no. The page absolutely shows a repeating aspect of the novel, which is the coming together of the primary characters as they try to decipher the killer’s riddles in time to prevent more murders. What it doesn’t reveal is the amount of action the book contains, or the strong relationships between all the characters.

Play of Shadows is the third book in the Evan Wilding trilogy. It is based on the myth of the Minotaur, who was imprisoned in an underground labyrinth by his stepfather, King Minos of Crete. To keep the Minotaur alive and to exact revenge against King Aegeus of Athens, the monster was fed a tribute every nine years of fourteen Athenian maidens and youths. The killer in Play of Shadows is enthralled with this myth and what is says about the relationship between fathers and sons. In his own horrible way, he is recreating the myth and waiting to take on a hero who might have the courage to kill him as Theseus slew the Minotaur.

Visit Barbara Nickless's website.

The Page 69 Test: At First Light.

Q&A with Barbara Nickless.

--Marshal Zeringue