"Echo"

Tracy Clark is the author of Echo, the third novel in the Detective Harriet Foster police procedural series. She is also author of the Cass Raines PI series, a two-time Sue Grafton Memorial Award- winning author, the 2024 Anthony Award- winner for Best Paperback Original, the 2024 Lefty Award-winner for Best Mystery and the 2022 winner of the Sara Paretsky Award. She is a board member-at-large of Sisters in Crime, Chicagoland and a member of International Thriller Writers, and serves on the boards of Mystery Writers of America Chicago and the Midwest Mystery Conference.

Clark applied the Page 69 Test to Echo and reported the following:

Darn it! My books always seem to fail the Page 69 Test. Readers turning to page 69 in my latest Det. Harriet Foster novel, Echo, won’t get much story, but they will, thank goodness, get a great deal of character. In fact, page 69 finds my complicated, inwardly directed cop, Harri, finally making an effort to connect with her new partner, Det. Vera Li.

Like a snail in a shell, Harri has been figuratively trudging through the morass of grief, loss and guilt, also deep pain and the feeling of lost opportunity to have made things different. She’s lost a partner, a young son, a marriage, and the life she had before, and hasn’t yet found a way to right the ship.

And in comes Det. Vera Li, who sees her, grabs ahold, and is determined to help her out of the hole she’s in. Li is quite a different character. Married, with a two-year-old son and her mother living in the home, Vera is open, smart, intuitive, ambitious, and sees the world half full. She hasn’t experienced loss on the level that Harri has experienced it.

While Harri keeps the world, and everyone in it, three arm lengths from her, Vera doesn’t appear to need the distance. Slowly, the two begin to mesh and come to not only like each other, but respect and depend on one another.

Page 69 reveals another inch forward for Harri, and a quiet victory for Vera. In this short exchange of dialogue, we get a sense of the two together, the shorthand and trust that’s forming. I don’t think the two will get to the braiding each other’s hair stage—or maybe they will; I’ll have to see—but there’s less push from Harri now, a little crack in her armor here, even a little glimpse into the woman she used to be before her world fell apart.

From page 69:

A white bag dropped onto her desk. Harri jumped. “Jesus.”

Detective Vera Li stood there in a beanie and a damp navy peacoat. Ready for the day, her dark, keen eyes having no doubt scanned the room and everybody in it. “Crullers from Mason’s,” she announced.

Vera dropped her battered backpack on her desk, then plopped down in her squeaky chair, plopping a similar bag in front of her. “The line was halfway out the door, but they’re worth it.”

“What’s the occasion? It’s not my birthday.”

Harri eyed the bag in front of her, then the one in front of Vera, grease splotching the sides of both. “Or yours.”

Vera’s brows furrowed, skeptical. “You know my birthday?”

“March second. You want the year?”

Vera lifted her pack, opened the bottom drawer, shoved it in. “Should I be afraid?”

Harri shrugged, offered a small smile. “I can’t tell you what to be.”

Harri’s got a ways to go, but page 69 is a good start.

Visit Tracy Clark's website.

Q&A with Tracy Clark.

My Book, The Movie: What You Don’t See.

Writers Read: Tracy Clark (July 2021).

The Page 69 Test: Runner.

The Page 69 Test: Hide.

The Page 69 Test: Fall.

Writers Read: Tracy Clark (December 2023).

--Marshal Zeringue