The Page 69 Test: "The Bone Queen"

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

"The Bone Queen"

Will Shindler has spent most of his career working as a broadcast journalist for the BBC. He also spent nearly a decade working on a number of British television dramas,

working for both the BBC Drama Series Department, and Talkback Thames Television as a writer and script editor. He has been writing novels since 2020, including the five-book critically acclaimed DI Alex Finn series: The Burning Men, The Killing Choice, The Hunting Ground, The Blood Line, and The Cold Case. He currently combines reading news bulletins for BBC Radio London with his novel writing and has previously worked as a presenter for ITV West, a reporter for BBC Radio Five Live, and as one of the stadium presenters at the 2012 London Olympics. He lives in London.

Shindler applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Bone Queen, and reported the following:

I’m not going to lie, I found the premise of this absolutely fascinating. With some trepidation, I turned to page 69 of my novel The Bone Queen and was pleasantly surprised by what I found. My honest answer, after reading it, is yes: this page does give an accurate sense of the book as a whole.

By page 69, my protagonist Jenna has travelled to Athelsea (a fictional island off the coast of England) in search of her missing teenage daughter, Chloe. Jenna has already learned that Chloe may have become obsessed with a local legend: an ancient supernatural figure known as the Bone Queen.

Page 69 is where several crucial ideas converge. Chloe is shown scouring the internet for information about the Bone Queen, uncovering fragments of folklore and accounts of other teenagers - girls very much like herself - who appear to have been influenced by the same legend. One post in particular explains the myth:
One long post written by someone in Toronto claimed she was a spirit of retribution, punishing children for the sins of their parents.
From there, through Chloe’s perspective, we learn that Jenna is a recovering alcoholic - an important plot and character point of the novel - and that during her worst periods of drinking she was not always the mother she wanted to be. There’s one passage in particular that encapsulates her:
Later Jenna would be mortified, ashamed of herself, and would apologize profusely. In many ways she’d never stopped apologizing.
Taken together, the page establishes two ideas that sit at the core of the book: the Bone Queen as a figure who punishes children for parental wrongdoing, and Jenna as someone haunted by the fear that she may deserve that judgment.

From a writer’s point of view, that’s the ideal sweet spot of exposition and emotional truth. So, from this mildly surprised - and genuinely delighted - author’s perspective, page 69 successfully passes the test!