"Zadayi Red"

Caleb Fox has lived in many worlds. Raised in Cherokee country, he received a scholarship from Columbia University and moved to New York. Later he moved to Los Angeles where he wrote for newspapers, magazines and movies. Raised white and Christian, Fox was intrigued on a visit home to discover that his family was half Cherokee. He began to explore the great myths of Indian cultures.

His novel Zadayi Red is a fantasy set in prehistoric America. After the last page turned, he caught one of the characters for a quick interview.

“Su-Li? Su-Li? Would you give us a few words?”

The buzzard turns his head and studies you and me. In my mind, and yours, he says, Okay, you’re the writer guy. Su-Li sounds incredibly weary. Who’s this?

“A reader interested in our novel Zadayi Red. I know, you’re about to go back to the land where the Immortals live, but may we just ask a couple of questions?”

I’m worn out with mortals, says Su-Li.

You whisper, “How does he talk without sounds?”

“Magic,” I whisper back. “Spirit power.”

You look at me impatiently. Su-Li does the same, but harder.

I speak to the buzzard quickly, before we lose him. “Su-Li, tell us what you did on earth.”

I was the spirit guide of a medicine woman.

“Did you like being on earth?”

Living around death... His voice is full of sorrow.

“Tell us something about your life here.”

“I want to go home. Why don’t you show him? Let him read, uh, uh, page sixty-nine.”

I don’t like it.

Hey, it’s just like he cracks the book in a store.

“Okay,” I say, “give him a little more help. Let him see it, like a movie.”

Su-Li nods.

MOVIE, WITH A CRAWL:

When people got a got look at the intruders, they dropped their jaws. Tsola was blindfolded, steadied on one side with a hand on the back of a black panther. On the other side Sunoya bore a buzzard on her shoulder and held Tsola’s arm.

“That’s Su-Li on the young woman’s shoulder?”

“Sure.”

“Spirit guide. I don’t believe this.”

“You’re seeing it.”

Courtesy swerved like a drunk. A child cried. People actually spoke aloud. Some of the twelve chiefs half rose—not a single Peace Chief or War Chief had ever seen the Wounded Healer. Every head craned toward the slight figure of the tribe’s Seer.

Sunoya didn’t know which was bigger, astonishment at the unprecedented appearance of the most powerful chief of the nation, or fear of the black cat.

“The old woman is holding that panther?”

“No, he’s like a seeing eye dog. He also guards her. He shifts shape at will from human to panther.”

“Who gets a guard like that?”

“The Wounded Healer, the Medicine Chief of the entire tribe.”

“Why is she blind-folded?”

“She lives so far in the Cavern that her eyes can’t take light any more.”

As we watch, the old woman sits by the sacred fire and begins to unwrap the hide bundle she carries.

“I have to stop the movie, sorry. You’re not supposed to see the contents of the bundle.”

“What’s in it?”

“The most terrible news the tribe has ever had. Su-Li, explain…”

As I speak, the Immortal Buzzard winks once and dematerializes.

“How’d he do that?” you say. “Where’d he go?”

“Home. To the Land beyond the Sky Arch, where the Immortals live.”

“I’d like to go there.”

“If you read Zadayi Red, you will.”

Read an excerpt from Zadayi Red, and learn more about the book and author at Caleb Fox's website and blog.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Everything Matters!"

Ron Currie, Jr.'s first book, God is Dead, won the Young Lions Fiction Award from the New York Public Library and the Addison M. Metcalf Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to Everything Matters!, his debut novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 of my novel Everything Matters! is representative of the whole of the book in that it details the first meeting of the two characters whose love serves as one of the story’s centerpieces. The protagonist, Junior Thibodeau, is in gifted and talented class on the day of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster, and like kids all over the country, he and his classmates are watching the launch live on closed-circuit television. But Junior can’t concentrate on the launch, because a girl named Amy has just been introduced as a transfer from the Catholic school across town, and Junior is instantly smitten. Amy sits next to him, and as the lights are dimmed Junior is ostensibly watching the television, but in actuality he can’t take any of his other senses off of Amy—he smells the fabric softener on her clothes, hears the whisper of her breath, even feels the heat from her body. Then, of course, his attention is wrenched away from Amy when the shuttle explodes, and as he watches in horror he feels Amy’s hand on his, and this is the manner in which their love is first consummated:

“You feel Amy’s palm slide down the back of your hand, and when her fingers interlace with yours and squeeze, you squeeze back. It is not nearly the thrill that it should be. It is bare comfort. And then, as the first pieces of the Challenger hit the water off Cape Canaveral, the PAO finally comes back on. Reluctantly, as though he’s being prodded with the point of a blade, he utters what may be one of the biggest understatements of the twentieth century: ‘Obviously,’ he says, ‘a major malfunction.’”

It’s a bad portent for Junior and Amy, who despite the fact that they love one another deeply are up against some pretty serious forces, both earthly and cosmic, that conspire to keep them apart. And these forces succeed, for a while and in a manner. After graduating from high school Amy gives Junior the boot and moves to California, while Junior takes up drinking in Chicago. Years pass, and through a series of circumstances the two find themselves together again, then again separated in a manner that seems final. Through a twist of plot, though, they get an unlikely third chance, and the outcome of Junior’s life more or less hinges on what he does with it.

Read an excerpt from Everything Matters!, and learn more about the book and author at Ron Currie, Jr.'s website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Last Night in Montreal"

Emily St. John Mandel was born on the coast of British Columbia, Canada, in 1979. She studied dance at The School of Toronto Dance Theatre and lived briefly in Montreal before relocating to New York.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to Last Night in Montreal, her debut novel, and reported the following:

When I was asked if I’d be at all interested in writing about page 69 of Last Night in Montreal, I was a little worried that it might turn out to one of those pages with two words on it (“Part Two”.) But as it happens, that’s page 63, and page 69 really isn’t a bad representation of the book at all. Although I suppose a person could come away from page 69 with the impression that the book has some religious content, when really it doesn’t; it’s just that there’s a character who writes messages in bibles.

By way of background, Last Night in Montreal tells the interlinked stories of several people, including Lilia, who was abducted as a child by her father, and Christopher, the private detective who becomes obsessed with her case. After the abduction Lilia and her father travel constantly to avoid detection, and Lilia develops a habit of leaving anonymous messages in motel room bibles along the way. At the age of eight, she writes a message across the 22nd psalm of a Gideon bible in a motel room in Toledo: “Stop looking for me. I’m not missing; I do not want to be found. I wish to remain vanishing. I don’t want to go home.”

The bible eventually falls into the hands of Christopher, the private detective who’s recently agreed to take on her case. Page 69 catches him at the moment when his obsession begins. He’s lying in bed late at night, unable to sleep, reading a book and listening to his wife moving restlessly around the house. A colleague gave him the bible with the child’s message written in it earlier that day, and he can’t stop thinking about it; it’s lying now on his bedside table. From page 69:

Something was bothering him; he put the book down on the bedside table and picked up the Bible again. The child’s handwriting obscured part of the Twenty-second Psalm. He read the psalm aloud once, and then recited the first two stanzas by memory to the plaster ceiling: “Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring? O my God, I cry in the daytime, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.”

He heard his wife turn the volume of the radio up somewhere far away in the house, as if she was hoping to drown him out, but realized that she couldn’t possibly have heard him. The radio was abstract from this distance, soft static and inaudible voices. He glanced at the bedside clock; it was three-forty-five in the morning.

“If you don’t want to be rescued,” Christopher said aloud to the ceiling, “then why the Twenty-second Psalm?”

Read an excerpt from Last Night in Montreal, and learn more about the book and author at Emily St. John Mandel's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"East of the Sun"

Julia Gregson has worked in women's magazines in the UK, US and the Far East. She has had several serials and short stories published and read on the radio, and was a finalist for the 2005 Waverton Book Award for her first novel, The Water Horse.

Gregson applied the “Page 69 Test” to her latest novel, East of the Sun, and reported the following:

On page 69 of East of the Sun, we’re having a drink of crème de menthe in the cabin of Victoria Sowerby, ‘Tor to her friends.

‘Tor, aged 19, is on board the Kaisar-i-Hind en route to Bombay, and she is making a brave attempt to make a funny story out of another love affair (this time with a Cambridge homosexual) that went wrong.

The year is 1928, and ‘Tor is a member of The Fishing Fleet, the rather unkind name given to the many women who went out to India during the years of the British Raj, hoping to find husbands there. Statistically, their chances were good: British men outnumbered their women folk by three to one in India. For girls who hadn’t found a husband during the London season, the Indian social season represented a sort of last chance saloon. Those who failed to find their man during this hectic three months, of parties, polo matches and picnics were shipped home as ‘Returned Empties.’ Ouch.

The idea for this strand of my story came from my own mother in law who at the age of 18 went to Bombay as a member of The Fishing Fleet having been married off herself after a confusing marriage to an older homosexual. When that marriage was annulled, she was sent East. In many ways I felt that this random system of sending naïve girls across the world on their own, made the Indian system of arranged marriages, where at least prospective partners were known to parents, look surprisingly benign!

Read an excerpt from East of the Sun, and learn more about the book and author at Julia Gregson's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Come Sunday"

Isla Morley grew up in South Africa during apartheid. During the country’s State of Emergency, she graduated from Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University in Port Elizabeth with a degree in English literature. By 1994 she was one of the youngest magazine editors in South Africa, but she left career, country, and kin when she married an American and moved to the United States. For more than a decade she pursued a career in nonprofit work, focusing on the needs of women and children.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to Come Sunday, her debut novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Come Sunday places you reluctantly in the middle of a funeral service. That fact alone may trigger the avoidance instinct and compel your fingers to shuffle through for another page – except for the voice of Abbe Deighton, the main character, drawing you immediately into her tale. Assailed by grief, she is incapable of participating in a ritual that is supposed to offer comfort and closure. For a moment, her attention is diverted from the casket to a couple of children running outside.

Abbe is unable to imagine what lies ahead. She does not know, at this junction, how the present crisis will cause her to examine her closest relationships, how she will have to wrestle with the ghosts from her youth and return to her homeland only to uncover life-altering secrets. But also unimaginable for her at this point are the transcendent moments that are to come, moments that will not only bear witness to the resilience of the human spirit, but to its triumph over despair.

The fact that you have landed smack in the middle of a funeral belies the overall character of the book. It is not a story about death but life, the complexity of life, the unexpected nature of life and how tragedies inevitably rearrange one’s priorities. It’s a story not so much about loss as it is about discovery, about the rocky road to redemption. The funeral on page 69 is the marking of the end of one life, but it is the start of the journey to a new one.

From page 69:

The words are indecipherable, but the melody weaves its familiar thread through the crowd. Behind me people begin singing along in English “Abide With Me.” Their song seems to rock the church as though it were a cradle until we are all gently swaying, swaddled in song.

The rocking dislodges the last few bolts battening down my composure. When I careen forward, two hands – Greg’s on one side, Rhiaan’s on the other – anchor me to the pew.
…

I straighten up, accept Rhiaan’s handkerchief, and stare out at the courtyard. A mother has taken her fussy child outside and is pointing to the plumeria blossoms on the tree. I do not recognize her. Two little boys chase after each other, hands shaped as pistols.

It cannot be that she is no longer here.

Preview Come Sunday, and learn more about the book and author at Isla Morley's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lace Makers of Glenmara"

Heather Barbieri’s first novel, Snow in July (Soho Press), was selected as a Book Sense Pick, a Glamour magazine “Riveting Read,” and a Library Journal Notable First Novel. Before turning to writing fiction full-time, she was a magazine editor, journalist, and film critic.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new novel, The Lace Makers of Glenmara, and reported the following:

My second novel, The Lace Makers of Glenmara tells the story of Kate, a 26-year-old American who unexpectedly finds herself stranded in a Gaelic village in Western Ireland. There, she begins the slow process of healing from past loss and heartbreak, as she forms a bond with a group of Lace Makers: Bernie, alone and yearning for a new purpose since the death of her husband; Aileen, who despairs over conflicts with her teenage daughter; Moira, caught in a cycle of abuse and detail; Oona, in remission from breast cancer; and Colleen, worried about her fisherman husband, missing at sea.

Is page 69 representative of the novel? Yes and no. It wouldn’t have been my first choice, given that it’s a relatively quiet excerpt, but it does give a good snapshot of Bernie and Aileen’s relationship, and how Kate, though warmly embraced by most of the lace makers, isn’t welcomed by everyone.

In this chapter, Aileen has gone over to Bernie’s for tea. The two women have known each other since childhood, Bernie the eternal optimistic, and Aileen her opposite. Bernie is generally a good listener, and Aileen needs to vent about her daughter, her sister, Moira, and even the state of her marriage. Instead, she finds that Bernie is distracted by their new visitor, Kate, to whom she has offered a room—and friendship, leaving Aileen feeling displaced.

Well, Moira was another story. Moira, who resented her and loved her all at once.

It was easier with Bernie, a lifelong friend who accepted Aileen as she was, who laughed at her jokes and sympathized with her problems, large and small. Aileen could be herself with Bernie, her other self, the self that wasn’t a mother or a wife, just Aileen, Ailey, a girl once more. Bernie the link to her past. Aileen depended on those Mondays, on Bernie.

She noticed the table was set for two, not three. “Has she gone then?”

“Kate? No. She’s delivering the paper.”

“If I’d known you’d needed help—” Aileen sometimes pitched in with the deliveries. She couldn’t believe Bernie hadn’t asked her first. She knew the routes, the customers.

Bernie poured the tea. “I thought it would do her good to get to know the place better.”

“Why would she want to do that? She said she was moving on.”

That’s what Aileen thinks—or hopes. Instead, Kate ends up staying, stirring up a resentment in Aileen that knows no bounds.

While p. 69 gives a taste of the novel’s tone and the women’s daily lives, it doesn’t contain the evocative descriptions of the landscape, the snappy dialogue, nor other colorful characters that make the novel especially rich and charming—but be assured: most of the other 199 pages do!

Read an excerpt from The Lace Makers of Glenmara, and learn more about the book and autor at Heather Barbieri’s website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Cutting"

James Hayman spent more than twenty years as a senior creative director at one of New York’s largest advertising agencies.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to his new novel The Cutting, and reported the following:

The Cutting introduces readers to Detective Sergeant Michael McCabe, a former New York City homicide cop, who has moved with his young daughter to the supposedly safer confines of Portland, Maine. At least that’s what McCabe thought before he was called in to investigate the brutal murder of a sixteen-year-old girl who’s heart has been cut from her body with surgical precision.

On page sixty-nine McCabe is questioning Dr. Philip Spencer, a cardiac surgeon and head of the heart transplant program at nearby Cumberland Medical Center. He’s trying to find out if the murder might be part of an elaborate conspiracy to obtain and sell black market organs for illegal transplant procedures.

Spencer tries to convince McCabe that such a thing would simply not be possible.

Here’s what we learn on page sixty-nine:

...he (Spencer) said in a considered voice, “but who’s going to perform the transplant, and where? Any recognized transplant center would be crazy to even think about it. So would a qualified surgeon. The operation can’t be done by a surgeon acting alone, no matter how skilled or experienced, and it can’t be done on a kitchen table. When I transplant a heart, there are ten to twelve specialized people in the OR. All critical to the procedure. Plus a lot of sophisticated equipment. Most important is a heart- lung machine and a perfusionist to run it. The heart- lung machine circulates and oxygenates the patient’s blood and keeps him or her alive between the time the sick heart is removed and the healthy heart goes in and begins beating.”

“What else is required?”

“What else?” Spencer shrugged. “A diagnostic lab to perform preop and post- op tests. A well- stocked blood bank. A facility for postoperative recovery and one- on- one care for at least a few days. You need an array of monitors. You need someone to prescribe and administer antirejection drugs and to watch the patient for signs of infection due to a compromised immune system. You need to be able to follow a fairly rigid postoperative protocol. I just don’t see how some kind of
rogue surgeon could put all that together on his own.”

“How long is a living heart viable after it’s harvested?”

“Not long. Four or five hours. Our heart in New Hampshire will be placed in an iced saline solution in an ordinary picnic cooler, put on a helicopter, and flown directly here. While that’s being done, we’ll remove our patient’s diseased heart and attach him to the heartlung machine until he receives his new heart. It’s all very tightly coordinated.” Four or five hours. Terri Mirabito estimated Katie’s time of death as forty-eight to seventy-two hours before Lacey found her in the scrap yard. Since her body was found around 8:00 p.m. Friday, a transplant would have to have taken place sometime between 8 00 p.m. Tuesday and 8:00 p.m.Wednesday. Twenty- four hours. A big window.

“How long does a transplant operation take?”

“Depends how complicated. Anywhere from four hours to a whole day.”

McCabe resisted the temptation to ask Spencer where he was between Tuesday night and Wednesday night. Or Thursday while the body was being dumped. He had no evidence whatsoever that

Read an excerpt from The Cutting, and learn more about the book and author at James Hayman's website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Scenic Route"

Binnie Kirshenbaum is the author of two short story collections and six novels. She is a professor of fiction writing at the Columbia University Graduate School of the Arts and lives in New York City.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new novel, The Scenic Route, and reported the following:

Page 69 is a digression; the narrator, Sylvia Landsman, is recounting the sorry mess her Aunt Thea and Uncle John made of their lives because they lacked conviction and practicality. It's a story within the story, and in that way, it is very essence of The Scenic Route; the twists and turns, the detours and digressions of back roads and stories both. All of the stories contained in the over-arching story are in some way or another connected. The "plot-line" to this novel, such as there is a plot-line-- Sylvia's affair with Henry, a man who is sweet, charming, weak, and sponging off his rich wife-- is mirrored in Aunt Thea and Uncle John's plight.

...they (Thea and John) lived off John's allowance, which was a good amount for a student, because as far as his parents knew, that's what John was: a young man completing his education at Dartmouth ... born into wealth (they) were now, relatively speaking, poor. Poor, but pinch-me happy to be together, to live out their artsy-fartsy dreams: writing and painting by day ... John and Thea-- young and in love and starry-eyed-- resided in the domicile of their artistic inventions where everything was possible, although not everything was considered. Such as: Thea got pregnant.... A baby costs money, more money than they had.... John would have to give up writing stories by day. He would have to get himself a job. Some wretched, meaningless job....(p.69)

The first line of The Scenic Route makes it clear that this affair has ended, and that the ending isn't a happy one. But the end, the destination, doesn't much matter. The reason for this novel is the exploration of the characters, and how they came to arrive at the end of the affair. The narrative voice is the driving (sorry!) force, and it's either going to carry you along, or not; voice, and the meditation on storytelling as a way to of making sense of life, storytelling as a means of existence. Were page 69 to be deleted, one could still follow the novel without getting lost; yet, without that page (and all the others similar in intent) there would be no there there. In a nutshell-- it's not germane, but it is necessary.

Browse inside The Scenic Route, and learn more about the book and author at Binnie Kirshenbaum's website.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Trust No One"

Gregg Hurwitz is the author of several critically acclaimed thrillers, most recently The Crime Writer which was a finalist for the CWA Ian Fleming Steel Dagger and the ITW Best Novel of the Year award. In addition to his novels, Hurwitz has written screenplays for several major Hollywood studios and is currently writing for Marvel Comics.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to his new novel, Trust No One, and reported the following:

Trust No One is really two interlaced thrillers. One tells the story of what happened to Nick Horrigan when he was a seventeen-year-old kid, and the other -- the main one -- shows what's happening to him now. The book opens with a bang, when he's dragged from bed by a SWAT team, hauled outside to a waiting Black Hawk, and told that a terrorist has seized control of a nuclear power plant and is threatening to blow it up...unless he can talk to Nick.

Nick has no idea who the hell this guy is.

Nick's a classic Hitchcockian Everyman, but as I alluded to earlier, he had something horrible happen when he was younger. Page 69 shows what happens after his beloved stepfather is murdered (and Nick left to feel responsible). Nick has just gotten into a fight with his mother, who stormed out of the house. The phone rings, and an ominous caller makes an indirect threat on his mother's life. He's told to part the front curtains, and when he does, he sees a dark sedan parked at the curb. "Come outside," the voice demands. P. 69 shows what happens when Nick walks out of his house in the night to that dark sedan, and it is the defining moment of his young life.

I hope the page is representative of a book with a lot of twists and turns -- and suspense. But even more than that, it catches a key moment in the story, where the entire plot hangs in the balance.

Read an excerpt from Trust No One and watch the video trailer.

Learn more about the book and author at Gregg Hurwitz's website and blog.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Pretend Wife"

Bridget Asher is the author of My Husband’s Sweethearts.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new novel, The Pretend Wife, and reported the following:

The Pretend Wife is about a woman whose irrepressible college boyfriend, Elliot Hull, works his way back into her life. In fact, he has a proposition -- he wants Gwen to pretend to be his wife for the weekend, to appease his dying mother. With her husband's encouragement, she goes and, along the way, falls in love with his wise mother, his kind sister, her smart kids -- and, well, Elliot Hull himself.... The novel ruminates on love and marriage, compromise and betrayal, what's real and what's not, and also dips into Gwen's childhood and the death of her mother.

Page 69 of the novel is an important one. Gwen and Elliot are in college in the whirlwind of their relationship -- this is before Gwen slaps Elliot in a bar and everything falls apart. They're standing in the shallow end of the university pool. Elliot is asking her about her mother's death, trying to get her to talk about it, but she isn't ready. She starts crying. This is the problem -- Elliot loves her too much, wants too much from her. He doesn't dole out love in little packets as her husband now does. With him, love is an ocean. This scene glimpses that ocean ...

Read an excerpt from The Pretend Wife, and learn more about the book and author at Bridget Asher's website and blog.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Year That Follows"

Scott Lasser's novels include Battle Creek and All I Could Get. His non-fiction has appeared in magazines ranging from Dealmaker (for which he wrote a regular book column) to The New Yorker.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to his new novel, The Year That Follows, and reported the following:

Is page 69 representative of The Year That Follows? Yes, emphatically so. Of course, what writer would say otherwise? Wouldn’t I cut it if it weren’t essential? I’d like to think so.

One point of clarification: I had no input as to what actually ended up on page 69. Knopf did that.

The Year That Follows begins with Cat Miller traveling to New York on September 10th of 2001. She goes out to dinner with her brother Kyle, who tells her he thinks he’s fathered a child, as his ex-girlfriend just got back from 3 months maternity leave, and they broke up a year ago. The next day he goes off to work and is never heard from again. Cat goes in search of the lost child, knowing only the mother’s first name and having a picture of the woman.

Close to a year later Cat is still looking for the boy when her father asks her to come to California to mark the anniversary of her brother’s death. Sam is 80, a World War II veteran partially disabled from a kamikaze attack. On page 69 he is standing at the end of the pier in Santa Barbara, staring at the ocean on which he once fought a war, when he notices a soldier next to him. The kid, on leave from Afghanistan, is dressed in civilian clothes; Sam spies his dog tags pressing against the inside of his t-shirt. Though it’s been 57 years since he was injured, Sam still carries his tags in the front pocket of his pants. “They got him through the war, and he goes nowhere without them, though he doesn’t wear them around his neck. He’d be self-conscious about that.”

When Sam asks the soldier about his tags, the kid says they are “(a) reminder of the guys who are over there. Around here it would be easy, you know, to forget there’s a war on.”

Well, this is page 69 of a book that has 241, and this soldier will show up again. Sam is 80, but the war has never left him; he wakes every night having lived the kamikaze attack. And now he is trying to come to peace with the death of his son, who never went into the military but died from what he fears nightly. On page 71 he’ll give the solder one of his dog tags, saying, “It got me through, and it’ll get you through.”

For the first time in sixty years Sam has relinquished a dog tag, that little tin marker of his identity. But, then again, he’s about to do a lot of things differently.

Read an excerpt from The Year That Follows, and learn more about the author and his work at Scott Lasser's website and blog.

Visit the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Sworn to Silence"

Bestselling author Linda Castillo is the recipient of numerous writing awards, including the Daphne du Maurier Award of Excellence, the Holt Medallion and a nomination for the Rita.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new novel, Sworn to Silence, and reported the following:

Page 69 captures the tone of Sworn to Silence, but it isn’t representative of the book as a whole. This particular passage takes you into the troubled mind of an important secondary character, John Tomasetti, and reveals the very dark place he’s landed in his life.

... while John was squarely at the bottom of the barrel, he wasn’t so far gone that he could blow his brains out.

Not yet, anyway.

Sighing, he turned from the window and slid into the chair behind his desk. He thought about Nancy and Donna and Kelly, and shame for what he’d become cut him. The urge to pull out the photos was strong, but he resisted. Seeing their faces didn’t make him feel any better. He couldn’t remember them the way they’d been. When he thought of his wife and two little girls, he saw them the way they’d been on the dreadful night he’d found them...

Tomasetti is an integral character to the book, but Sworn to Silence is Kate’s story.

Kate Burkholder is a small town police chief who was born Amish. Facing a series of brutal murders, she finds herself torn between the two cultures. The values she learned as a child versus the lessons taught to her not only as an adult, but as a cop. Kate walks a fine line. Sometimes she crosses the line, but always with good reason.

Sixteen years ago, a series of brutal murders shattered the peaceful farming community of Painters Mill, Ohio. A young Amish girl, Katie Burkholder, survived the terror of the Slaughterhouse Killer. In the aftermath of the violence, the town was left with a sense of fragility, a loss of innocence, and for Katie, the realization that she no longer belonged with the Amish.

Now, a wealth of experience later, Kate Burkholder is back. Her Amish roots and big city law enforcement background make her the perfect candidate for Chief of Police. She’s certain she’s come to terms with her past—until the first body is discovered in a snowy field. Kate vows to stop the killer before he strikes again. But to name him, she would betray both her family and her Amish past—and expose a dark secret that could destroy her.

Read an excerpt from Sworn to Silence, and learn more about the book and author at Linda Castillo's website.

Check out the complete list of books in the Page 69 Test Series.

--Marshal Zeringue