languages. She is vice president of the Romantic Novelists’ Association in the UK. Cohen grew up in western Maine and studied English at Brown University, Cambridge University, and the University of Reading, where she is now an associate lecturer in creative writing. She lives in Berkshire in the United Kingdom.
Cohen applied the Page 69 Test to Bad Men, her first thriller, and reported the following:
On page 69 of the hardback version of Bad Men, my protagonist Saffy, a wealthy and beautiful socialite, tells her younger sister Susie that she’s leaving London and going up to Scotland to see someone. Her sister, typically, jumps to the conclusion that Saffy is going to Scotland for a date and she says to Saffy, “I want you to go up to Scotland and catch yourself a dangerous, sexy man.”Visit Julie Mae Cohen's website.
We quickly see that Saffy has indeed gone up to Scotland to see a man. However, she’s not on a date. She is stalking a man called Jonathan Desrosiers: surveilling him from her car, looking through a rubbish bin to see what interesting things he’s thrown away, and secretly following him to his remote cabin, which in her opinion "looks mostly suitable for goats, not people.”
Saffy, without being spotted, leaves Jon to wallow in his damp, dismal cabin, and goes zooming off in her high-powered and expensive car to Inverness, where she pulls up outside a dog shelter. “As I get out of the car, a chorus of barks starts up from the back.”
And that is the end of page 69.
On the face of it, page 69 doesn’t give us such a good idea of the entire book. Bad Men is a serial killer thriller, and no one gets killed on page 69. There are no decapitated heads or blood, worse luck.
However, in another, deeper way, page 69 is a very good indication indeed of the entire book. Because aside from being a serial killer thriller—the story of murderer Saffy, who kills bad men—my novel is also a really deeply twisted romcom. And on page 69, I turn several romcom tropes on their head.
Her sister Susie, who doesn’t know about Saffy’s murderous hobby, wants Saffy to meet someone “dangerous”—but the twist is that Saffy is the dangerous one. Saffy isn’t going up to Scotland to date a man; she’s going to stalk him. Jonathan is in fact her love interest, not someone she’s planning to murder…but you wouldn’t know that from page 69. And as we discover on the following pages, Saffy is going to a dog shelter not to adopt an adorable puppy as a romantic gift, but to pick up an unwanted dog to use it to engineer a strange and dramatic “meet-cute” with Jon. Let’s put it this way: the dog doesn’t get hurt, but she doesn’t like it very much, either.
The dog goes on to become an important character in the novel, and in fact the UK version of the novel has a picture of her on the back cover. Several reviewers have said they get worried about the dog after page 69, but I’m reassuring you again: the dog doesn’t suffer at all and ends up having a great life.
Unlike the many, many bad men who reach a messy end.
Does Saffy get Jon to notice her? Do they go on a date and fall in love? Or does she have to kill him? You’ll have to read the book to find out.
--Marshal Zeringue
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