Mark Stevens is the author of The Flynn Martin Thriller series including No Lie Lasts Forever (2025) and Two Truths and A Lie (2026); The Fireballer (2023), and The Allison Coil Mystery Series including Antler Dust, Buried by the Roan, Trapline, Lake of Fire, and The Melancholy Howl.
Buried by the Roan, Trapline, and Lake of Fire were all finalists for the Colorado Book Award. Trapline won.
Stevens applied the Page 69 Test to Two Truths and a Lie, and reported the following:
Well, bang.Visit Mark Stevens's website.
Page 69 of Two Truths and a Lie is, I hope, a fairly tense moment.
Television reporter Flynn Martin is discussing a news conference she has just covered with her station’s news director, Rick Goodman. The news conference was about the disappearance of an entire family—mother, father, son, and daughter—from their suburban Denver home.
But Flynn can’t tell Goodman what she’s just found on the dashboard of her car, a second note from an anonymous someone who is taunting her. She’s contemplating a trip to go see her nemesis from the first book in the series, No Lie Lasts Forever. The guy she’s thinking about going to see is a serial killer now behind bars in the Colorado prison system. She is sure he must be playing a role in the new messages, but she can’t let on (to anyone) that she might pay Harry Kugel (a.k.a. “PDQ”) a visit.
Because that would seem both entirely inappropriate and unprofessional.
In Two Truths and a Lie, the Page 69 Test gives us many facets of Flynn Martin. She’s thinking about her son. (The first note arrived, mysteriously, in her son Wyatt’s school backpack). She’s processing a fresh news story. We see Flynn thinking about who might have seen someone approach her car while she was off covering the news conference. “As Flynn talks, she scans. All the humans have scattered back to their air-conditioned comfort zone, but she spots a video doorbell on the house directly across the street.” And we see her cajoling her boss for a day off to go confront the guy she helped send off to prison.
As always, Flynn Martin has a lot on her mind. Page 69 gives us a glimpse of her juggling balls in the air and charting her course for what she needs to do for work and for herself.
The Page 69 Test: The Fireballer.
Q&A with Mark Stevens.
My Book, The Movie: The Fireballer.
Writers Read: Mark Stevens (June 2025).
The Page 69 Test: No Lie Lasts Forever.
My Book, The Movie: No Lie Lasts Forever.
Writers Read: Mark Stevens.
--Marshal Zeringue
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