farm girl, she’s spent the past decades thawing out in the West, hiking its deserts and mountains, bouncing along backcountry roads, and sometimes lending a hand at archaeological sites. After writing numerous travel guides and magazine articles about Sedona, Grand Canyon, and the Four Corners, she’s returned to her first love, writing novels. Today, Bryant lives with her musician husband in California, where she continues to seek out new adventures, finding them on hiking trails, at farmers markets, and in the pages of a good book.
She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Over the Edge, and reported the following:
A reader opening Over the Edge to page 69 would land in the middle of a conversation between two key characters, Jeep guide Del Cooper and Ryan Driscoll, a Forest Service law enforcement officer. The browser test is only partly successful, with hints and misses.Visit Kathleen Bryant's website.
To summarize, on page 69, Del has left work to find Ryan waiting for her outside. They discuss a specific angle of the case, the possibility that Franklin was dealing drugs. She tells Ryan she saw Franklin hand something to the landowner during a heated encounter at a party.
Ryan counters that his main concern is fire danger, especially near homeless encampments on tinder-dry Forest Service land. Franklin, a camper, may have hidden a meth lab somewhere on the forest and may have been selling drugs. Franklin’s companion Jane is in jail, but she’s a flawed witness, as well as a possible suspect.
A reader would need to flip back a few pages to catch up on key plot points: While guiding a tour in a remote canyon, Del found a dead body. Franklin, the victim, was murdered. Two days before her gruesome discovery, Del attended a party celebrating a proposed Forest Service land trade. Once the trade is finalized, the ranch owner and a local developer stand to gain millions.
By page 69, Del has already begun to wonder if Franklin knew something about the trade—knowledge that got him killed. Flipping ahead to page 70, the reader might also pick up on the attraction between Del and Ryan, who was her teenage crush.
But flipping pages back and forth would be cheating, right? Who does that?
Are the clues on page 69 enough to guess the end of the story? Or will readers, like Del, begin to suspect everyone after her witnesses go missing and rumors swirl faster than Sedona’s famed vortexes?
My Book, The Movie: Over the Edge.
Q&A with Kathleen Bryant.
--Marshal Zeringue
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