The Page 69 Test: "Cold Island"

Friday, September 5, 2025

"Cold Island"

Peter Colt is a 1996 graduate of the University of Rhode Island with a BA in Political Science. Colt was a 24-year veteran of the Army Reserve with deployments to

Kosovo and Iraq as an Army Civil Affairs officer. He is currently a police officer in Providence, Rhode Island. He is married to his long suffering wife with whom he is raising two sons.

He enjoys, kayaking and camping and tries to get on the local rivers and ponds as often as he reasonably can. Colt is also an avid cook, a hobby which manages to find its way into his novels. He is a proud member of both the Mystery Writers of America and The Pawtuxet Athletic Club.

He is the author of the Tommy Kelly mysteries, Cold Island (2025). He also wrote the Andy Roark series of books, The Off-Islander (2019) and Back Bay Blues (2020) and Death at Fort Devens (2022), The Ambassador (2023), The Judge (2024) and The Banker (2025). He has also published short stories in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine.

Colt applied the Page 69 Test to Cold Island and shared the following:

Page 69 shows the protagonists of Cold Island, Massachusetts State Police Detective Tommy Kelly and Nantucket Police Department Detective Jo Harris at work. They are in the NPD detective bureau, checking emails, reporting to bosses and waiting for forensic evidence. In short they are doing real and boring police work. It aint like the stuff on TV. It's not glamorous but it is authentic.

If a reader were to open Cold Island to page 69 they wouldn't get a good idea about the story. In fact they might be tempted to put the book back on the shelf and move onto something more interesting. The book is a dark, twisty, cold case story. There is a lot in it to grab a reader's attention but there isn't much of it on page 69. That said, page 69 works in the context of the novel because it is one of the threads that make up the tapestry of the novel. In this case the Page 69 Test doesn't work for my book, but the Page 34 Test would!

Part of the reason why the test doesn't work for Cold Island is that the story is a police procedural, a cold case, that bounces back and forth from 1981 to 2016. The story itself involves a serial killer and the investigation that results from the recovery of one of his victims remains thirty-five years later. The downside of being a cop, writing a police procedural is the temptation, no, the need to portray the police work as just work. Nothing sexy. Just putting the pieces together. In that sense, page 69 is reflective of the novel but that mania for relative accuracy is just one part of the novel.