The Page 69 Test: "There'll Be Shell to Pay"

Wednesday, July 9, 2025

"There'll Be Shell to Pay"

Molly MacRae spent twenty years in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Upper East Tennessee, where she managed The Book Place, an

independent bookstore; may it rest in peace. Before the lure of books hooked her, she was curator of the history museum in Jonesborough, Tennessee’s oldest town.

MacRae lives with her family in Champaign, Illinois, where she recently retired from connecting children with books at the public library.

MacRae applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, There'll Be Shell to Pay, with the following results:

If browsers open There’ll Be Shell to Pay at page 69, will they get a good or a poor idea of the whole story? Page 69 is the first page of chapter eleven, so it’s somewhat short. Here it is in full.
The young guy who glanced up from a computer screen when I opened the station door had to be Deputy Matt Kincaid. Figuring that out took no skill whatsoever. Tate only had one deputy. That deputy had a broken leg. Here was a deputy in a regulation khaki shirt, rising to greet me on one leg, with a hand on the desk to steady himself. Also, dead giveaway, a pair of crutches leaned against the wall behind him.

‘Good morning!’ He had an engaging smile and looked wobbly.

I waved him back down. ‘Don’t stand on my account.’

‘Okey-doke. Thanks.’ He eased himself back down. He looked younger than Kelly and O’Connor. Brawnier, too. Like a brawny surfer—blond with a fading tan. ‘You know, time doesn’t exactly fly when you’re stuck here like a dam—like a desk jockey—but I can at least get it right and say good afternoon instead of good morning.’

‘Good afternoon.’ Did people still talk about desk jockeys? Did young deputies say okey-doke? ‘Are you Deputy Kincaid?’

‘Yes, ma’am.’

‘Nice to meet you. I’m Maureen Nash.’

‘New owner of the Moon Shell,’ he said promptly.’
A browser can pick up quite a bit of information from page 69. The story takes place in a community so small that the sheriff has only one deputy. Small enough, too, that these two people, who have never met each other, know who each other must be. We know their names. We can guess that Maureen Nash is new here. Their exchange is friendly. Maureen is empathetic. Deputy Kincaid, though young, might be somewhat old-fashioned. All of this could rightly lead the browser to guess that the story isn’t terribly dark. While all of that gleaned information is helpful, too much is left out to consider the Page 69 Test accurate for this book.

What does page 69 leave out? Murder—There’ll Be Shell to Pay is a murder mystery. The browser only reading page 69 also doesn’t find out that the story takes place on Ocracoke, a tiny barrier island off the coast of North Carolina. Maureen, a storyteller and malacologist (a scientist who studies shells and the critters who create them), is also an amateur sleuth. The Moon Shell, that Maureen now owns, is a shell shop. The shop is haunted by the ghost of an 18th-century pirate.

So, no, the Page 69 Test doesn’t quite work for this book, but it has for others of my books and that’s why I enjoy applying it.