The Page 69 Test: "A Poisonous Palate"

Friday, August 16, 2024

"A Poisonous Palate"

Writing as Lucy Burdette, clinical psychologist Roberta Isleib is the author of 24 mysteries, including the Key West food critic mystery series. Her most recent book is A Poisonous Palate, along with a cookbook based on the

series (Lucy Burdette’s Kitchen.) Number 13, A Clue in the Crumbs, was a USA Today bestseller and Florida Book Award gold medal winner in popular fiction. Both A Dish to Die For and The Key Lime Crime won the bronze medal for popular fiction from the Florida Book Awards. She's a past president of Sisters in Crime, and currently president of the Friends of the Key West Library.

Burdette applied the Page 69 Test to A Poisonous Palate and reported the following:

Page 69 at the beginning of chapter 9 carries some important weight, but may not give the best idea of the whole book. Before I explain, I will show you the page:
“Almost every family has a secret they never discuss. Ours is this: We were taste testers for Pop-Tarts.”
—Laura M. Holson, “Confessions of a Pop-Tarts Taste Tester,” New York Times, October 6, 2023

I fired my empty coffee cup into the trash and walked two blocks to the Key Zest office. Once again, I felt baffled by the many moods of Catherine. How could one person be simultaneously imperious and grateful?

Palamina and Danielle had already gathered in Palamina’s office. My boss, Palamina, moved down from New York to Key West a few years ago to take charge of Key Zest, and she still struggled to adjust to the slower pace of island life. Danielle had worked at the e-zine as a receptionist almost from its inception. She was a native Key Wester—a Conch—who had embraced her engagement and upcoming marriage to a Key West police officer with the same ebullience she brought to her job and her friendships. At the moment, Palamina wore the expression of a cold-snap-stunned fish, so I suspected Danielle had been regaling her with the last-minute details of her Sunday wedding. She practically grabbed my hand to pull me in. “What do you have for us for next week?” she asked.
Why oh why couldn’t we have chosen a page highlighting some amazing cooking, or a pulse-pounding action sequence, or even some toe-curling sexy romance. (Oh wait, I don’t write that.) Instead, we find food critic Hayley Snow in transition from discussing possible sleuthing for a strong-minded woman intent on solving a cold case, to her arrival at the Key Zest office, where she works as a food critic.

I do like some of the character development on this page—Hayley’s confusion about this prickly woman who asked for help in the previous chapter, Danielle’s enthusiasm about her upcoming wedding, and their boss’s dismay at hearing too many nuptial details. But this page also highlights a big conundrum for the writer of a long running mystery series. A Poisonous Palate is number 14 in the Key West series, which means there will be a variety of consumers: loyal readers who have read every book in the series and know the characters better than I do, longtime readers who may have read the books but don’t have total recall, readers who’ve read some of the books but not all, and readers who are brand new to the series. One challenge is to summarize some of what’s happened in previous books, without plot spoilers and without tedium. The same goes for characters. I need to include enough information about recurring characters as they appear on the page so that new readers can pick up without getting lost, but without boring devoted fans. I hope I did that here on page 69!