The Page 69 Test: "Saint of the Narrows Street"

Sunday, February 2, 2025

"Saint of the Narrows Street"

William Boyle is the author of eight books set in and around the southern Brooklyn neighborhood of Gravesend, where he was born and raised. His most recent

novel is Saint of the Narrows Street. His books have been nominated for the Hammett Prize, the John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger Award in the UK, and the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France, and they have been included on best-of lists in the Washington Post, CrimeReads, and more. He currently lives in Oxford, Mississippi.

Boyle applied the Page 69 Test to Saint of the Narrows Street and reported the following:

From page 69:
Chooch opens the back door, and he pushes the wheelbarrow straight outside. No stairs this way. Again, Giulia and Risa trail him. Communication seems less and less necessary. They're following his lead. He's trying not to feel, only do what needs doing.
Page 69 finds the main characters--Risa, Giulia, and Chooch, with baby Fabrizio in tow--in a precarious position, away from Saint of the Narrows Street (their block in southern Brooklyn where most of the action of the book is set), at Chooch's crumbling country house in upstate New York. They have arrived there after things took a dark turn in Risa's apartment with her bad seed husband, Sav. To say too much about this scene would spoil a key plot point in the first part, but I do think that reading this page would give readers a good idea of the whole book. The tone and feel of it, especially. You can get a sense of the position these characters are in, their backs against the wall, the desperation they're feeling, the way they're struggling with decisions they've had to make. You can get a sense, I think, of what's coming in the future for them. The way this moment, this memory, will haunt their lives. This scene is freighted with tension and heartbreak, but there's also dark humor to it.