"Lake County"

Lori Roy’s debut novel, Bent Road, was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best First Novel by an American Author. Her work has been twice named a New York Times Notable Crime Book and has been included on various “best of” and summer reading lists. Until She Comes Home was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a finalist for the Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel.

Let Me Die in His Footsteps was included among the top fiction of 2015 by Books-A-Million and named one of the best fifteen mystery novels of 2015 by Oline Cogdill. It also received the 2016 Edgar Allan Poe Award for Best Novel, making Roy the first woman to receive an Edgar Award for both Best First Novel and Best Novel—and only the third person ever to have done so. Gone Too Long was named a People magazine Book of the Week, was named one of the Best Books of Summer 2019, and was excerpted by Oprah magazine.

Roy applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Lake County, and reported the following:

In Lake County, page 69 is only half a page. It is the last page of a chapter, which is told from the point of view of the protagonist’s love interest. In these few paragraphs, we learn Truitt is waiting for a man named Wiley to return with Truitt’s mother. Upon hearing Truitt was in trouble, Wiley stormed out of the house to go find Truitt’s mother without learning the gravity of Truitt’s trouble. Truitt wasn't caught running a bolita game, as Wiley assumed. Truitt had killed a man. Truitt regrets not making Wiley slow down enough to let Truitt tell him the whole story. After waiting several hours, Truitt fears something terrible has happened to Wiley and his mother.

Because page 69 is only half a page, readers dropping into this spot would have little context to understand the plot that is well in motion. That said, the section demonstrates the tension, suspense, and high stakes that drive the novel. Readers would get a sense of the novel's voice and its genre.

The Page 69 Test is an intriguing exercise. In the few paragraphs on that page, I find elements of storytelling that I regularly try to incorporate as I write a novel. We get a ticking clock because Truitt has been waiting for hours. We get escalating stakes because Truitt regrets not giving Wiley the whole story. The story Wiley didn’t get is that Truitt killed a man. Murder has much higher stakes than running a bolita game, which is what Wiley thinks Truitt has done. And lastly, the passage ends with a cliffhanger. The clock has been ticking for so long, that Truitt fears something has gone very wrong for his mama and Wiley.

Visit Lori Roy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue