Schellman currently lives and writes in the mountains of Virginia in the company of her family and the many houseplants she keeps accidentally murdering.
She applied the Page 69 Test to her new Lily Adler Mystery, A Scandal in Mayfair, and reported the following:
From page 69:Visit Katharine Schellman's website.Chapter 7Page 69 of A Scandal in Mayfair comes at the start of a chapter, so it’s a particularly short snippet because of the heading. And I think, in this case, it wouldn’t give brand new readers a particularly strong sense of the book as a whole.
“What a smart little rig, Captain,” Lily said as Jack handed first her and then his sister up into his new curricle.
He had called, as promised, first thing in the morning, arriving just as Lily and Amelia were finishing breakfast. As Jack strode into the dining room, offering a polite greeting and helping himself to a plate of sausages, Lily had seen Carstairs hovering in the hallway before he shook his head and walked away. She had smiled to herself at his resignation, though she could not help wondering what her rather stoic butler, who, in spite of his own slightly checkered past, was now a model of propriety, made of Jack’s easy comings and goings these days.
A simple explanation was sitting beside her, holding her hat against the wind. And that, Lily reminded herself, trying not to think of her embarrassment the night before, was all there was to it.
Except this morning. She could tell from Jack’s expression that he had something to share.
It does give a good sense of the setting—London in 1817—which strongly influences how the characters behave. The rules of the strict society Lily Adler and her friends live in required certain pretenses and politenesses, which impact not only how they interact with each other but also how Lily, as a sleuth, must handle her investigating. But because this short snippet is mostly focused on scene setting, it doesn’t give a strong sense of the intertwining mysteries the characters must solve or the stakes they are facing if they fail (blackmail being one of them!)
There is one group, though, that I think would learn a lot from this snippet: returning readers who want to know whether the tension that has been building slowly between two characters is going to pay off in a romance. While the Lily Adler books are, first and foremost, mysteries, there has been a strong subplot throughout all of them of Lily finding herself again after the unexpected death of her husband, and part of that has been the re-entry of romance into her life. Anyone who has been eagerly following that particular subplot probably wouldn’t be able to resist turning the page here!
The Page 69 Test: The Last Note of Warning.
--Marshal Zeringue
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