The Page 69 Test: "The Dark Below"

Tuesday, February 24, 2026

"The Dark Below"

Sherry Rankin grew up in New Jersey where she became an early and avid reader of mystery fiction. She earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in English and

currently lives in Abilene, Texas where she has taught writing and literature at a local university for twenty years.

Her novel, Strange Fire, was shortlisted for the 2017 Daniel Goldsmith First Novel Prize and won the 2017 CWA Debut Dagger Award.

Her debut thriller, The Killing Plains, was published by Thomas & Mercer as a super lead title in February 2025.

Rankin applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Dark Below, and reported the following:

On page 69, Teddy stops by her father Milton’s house to check on him and drop off a few groceries on her way to the crime scene. When Teddy was a child, Milton was a brutal domestic tyrant. Now, in his seventies, he’s a reclusive hoarder and an alcoholic—a shell of his former self, but still spiteful and manipulative. Teddy looks after him out of a sense of pity and family obligation, and he repays her kindness with complaints.

Here's a passage from page 69:
Teddy opened the refrigerator to put the milk away. The handle was sticky. A line of ants crawled up the door. She washed her hands and dried them with a paper towel. When she tossed it into the overflowing garbage pail, a crumpled letter on county letterhead caught her eye.

She pulled it out. “Dad, what’s this?”

Milton drained his beer. “Health Department thinks they can bully a veteran.”

Teddy scanned the letter. “This says you have thirty days to clean up before they take you to court.” She checked the date. “It’s from a week ago.”

Milton picked up his cigarette. “People need to mind their own goddamn business.”

“This place is a health hazard, Dad. It stinks.”

“It’s them rats—they die in the walls.” He flicked ash into the tray. “What can they do, sue me? I ain’t got nothin’.”

“They can send in a crew with a roll-off dumpster and gut the place. That what you want?” A dull pain was pulsing behind Teddy’s eyes. She looked at her watch. “I’ve got to go, Dad. We’ll talk about this later.” She folded the letter and tucked it in her back pocket as she left.
The Dark Below is largely concerned with the darkness people keep buried beneath the surface of their lives. While page 69 isn’t directly tied to the central mystery, it captures Teddy’s ongoing struggle to manage her own anger and grief while tending to others—balancing career and family, pride and pity, rage and restraint. In that sense, page 69 offers a representative glimpse of the novel’s thematic center, even as the larger plot continues to unfold elsewhere.