"Home"

Matthew Costello is an award-winning novelist, screenwriter and video game writer. His best-selling video games include The 7th Guest, Doom 3 and Pirates of the Caribbean. His horror novel, Beneath Still Waters, was filmed by Lionsgate. He also has written episodes and created TV formats for PBS, Disney, SyFy, and the BBC.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his latest novel, Home, and reported the following:

So—is page 69 of Home representative of the novel? Amazingly so.

On page 69, Christie, mom to the two kids, reeling from the horrors experienced upstate, learns that things may not be safe where she is heading, back to her home.

Not only that, she is learning that the big decisions are all hers, that despite bone-crushing fatigue and terrible fear, the safety of her family is up to her.

And one added element leaps off the page…where she realizes that she needs to talk with the kids about those decisions, that they are all in this nightmare together, even though they are just kids. Quite….the page.

Learn more about the book and author at Matthew Costello's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Jepp, Who Defied the Stars"

Katherine Marsh is the author of Jepp, Who Defied the Stars, the Edgar-award winning The Night Tourist, and a sequel, The Twilight Prisoner.

She applied the Page 69 Test to Jepp, Who Defied the Stars and reported the following:

Page 69 of Jepp, Who Defied the Stars:

As the weather grew more temperate—the Infanta’s small orchard in bud, the songbirds on the wing back North, Lia and I moved our lessons from her room to the palace grounds. So as to not to attract inquisitive eyes, we met twice a week in the early morning when even the Infanta’s gardeners were not yet at work rooting out toadstools and propping up wayward flowers and trees. Only the creatures of the garden were full of industry—the ants on a march, the robin darting for her worm—and Lia would narrate their labors as we danced, for she was much taken by even the smallest creatures.

Our afternoons were different, though not without pleasures. Freed from our lesson with Pim, we joined the others. When the sun bathed the gardens in dappled light, Maria and Sebastian would picnic beneath the small pear and apple trees. Hendrika encouraged us to join them in this activity—the Infanta enjoyed coming upon us all with her entourage and the servants made sure we had tables and chairs, and straw sun hats for the ladies, that complemented our stature. Robert joined us only when the Infanta was occupied inside the palace, for word was that she did not care for him distorting our tableau.

But it was the mornings that burn brightest now in my memory. I remember one such dawn when Lia and I danced among the pale yellow lilies and stalks of iris, still speckled with dew from their nightly ablutions. The moon was fading in the purple sky and an orb—perhaps Venus—twinkled faintly. Lia’s hands were snug in mine, her breath warm against my cheek. I held her close before she drew away and sighed.

“What troubles you?”

I feared that she did not care for my embrace, and wished in the urgency of youth to know the worst.

“I am thinking of home.”

That she was not thinking of me at all took me by surprise…

Page 69 of Jepp, Who Defied the Stars is wonderfully representative of my new book, a historical novel for young adult and adult readers. The narrator of the story—the “I” of the above passage--is Jepp, a teenager at the end of the 16th century who leaves his small town home to become a court dwarf. The court of the Infanta in the Spanish Netherlands offers Jepp new opportunities, friendships, and even his first possible romance. But there are hints of a dark side: We see an example of this when Jepp describes how Henrika, the keeper of the dwarfs, stages a scene with them for the pleasure of the Infanta. Such scenes are not fiction. Jepp’s story is based on both historical figures (including Jepp himself) and historical accounts that detail the ways in which court dwarfs were treated as possessions and playthings.

Jepp’s larger—and more universal--story is about the journey from innocence to experience. The Jepp narrating the story is older and more cynical but the self he describes on p. 69 is still an innocent, caught up in the promise of his new life and particularly of first love. Although Jepp glimpses hints of conformity and oppression (gardeners who roots out imperfection, the exclusion of Robert, a giant and friend of the dwarfs, from their staged tableau), like most teenagers, he is too lost in his own emotions, too self-centered, to truly see the world around him. This is why it surprises him to discover that Lia, the object of his love, is not even thinking about him. But Jepp is about to learn, in a terrible way, that almost everything he believes in and counts upon is not as it seems. As he struggles against powerful forces to control his own destiny, his story begins to merge with that of the new age of science and self-determination in Renaissance Europe.

For more about the book and author, check out Katherine Marsh's website or follow her on Twitter or on Facebook.

The Page 99 Test: The Night Tourist.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Big Exit"

While David Carnoy lives in New York City with his wife and children, his novels take place in Silicon Valley, where he grew up and went to high school (Palo Alto). His debut novel, Knife Music (2010), was a Top-10 bestseller on the Kindle and also a bestseller on the Nook. More medical thriller than high-tech thriller, to research the novel Carnoy spent a lot of time talking with doctors, visiting trauma centers, and trailed a surgeon at a hospital in Northern California to help create the book's protagonist, Dr. Ted Cogan.

The Big Exit (2012) isn't a sequel to Knife Music per se. However, a few of the characters from Knife Music figure prominently in the story. His second novel has more of a high-tech slant and reflects Carnoy's experiences as an executive editor at CNET.com, where he currently works and is trying resolve his obsession with consumer electronics products. He went to college at Wesleyan University and has an MFA in creative writing from Columbia University.

Carnoy applied the Page 69 Test to The Big Exit and reported the following:

For better or worse there's nothing terribly sexy about page 69 of The Big Exit. I should have realized in advance that I might end up posting something for this blog and made it sexier, but as it stands, it's the last page of a chapter and not even a full page. It's stunted, a half pint, the runt of the page litter.

Hank Madden, the detective in the novel (he was also in my first book, Knife Music) is near the end of questioning Beth Hill shortly after her husband, a high-tech entrepreneur, is found murdered in the garage of their Silicon Valley home (the wife's 911 call is what opens the book). One of the other detectives has pulled Madden out of the room to give him an update on their canvassing of the neighborhood and the two discuss a shoe print found outside the garage.

There's a bit of a Jaws moment -- the part where Brody really sees the shark for the first time and says, "You're going to need a bigger boat." In this case, the second detective, Burns, turns to Madden and says, "We're gonna need some help here." Madden says he knows. "Everybody's going to want a piece," Burns reiterates. To which Madden replies: "I'm good at sharing."

Of course, you know he really isn't good at sharing and these guys are in over their head. After all, it's quaint Menlo Park (yes, where Facebook is now headquartered), where you get a couple of murders a year, if that (in researching the book, I spent some time with the Menlo Park police).

The chapter certainly represents the police procedural aspect of the book, but I wouldn't say it's truly representative of the book, which I refer to as a Silicon Noir; it's a darker take on the Valley with some comedic elements.

My books are little unusual in that while the detective (Madden) is a main character, he's not the protagonist. He's got the proverbial demons to contend with, but the other characters, including the protagonist, Richie Forman -- fresh out of prison and making a living as a Sinatra impersonator -- have bigger personalities and are the ones who truly drive the book. I'm particularly fond of the tech blogger, Tom Bender, who Booklist describes as "a hilariously narcissistic blogger bent on breaking the case." Some think the character is based on Michael Arrington of Tech Crunch fame but I imagined him more as Steve Jobs reincarnated as a blogger.

Learn more about the book and author at David Carnoy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Shortest Way Home"

Juliette Fay received a bachelor's degree from Boston College and a master's degree from Harvard University. She lives in Massachusetts with her husband and four children. Shelter Me was her first novel, Deep Down True her second.

Fay applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, The Shortest Way Home, and reported the following:

Page 69 is a pivotal moment in The Shortest Way Home. Sean Doran has worked as a nurse in Third World war zones and disaster areas for the last twenty years. He comes home to Massachusetts for what he thinks is a brief stopover. But once there, he finds that things are falling apart with his elderly aunt who raised him and his 11-year-old orphaned nephew, Kevin.

On page 69 Kevin, who is a strangely quiet kid, makes Sean keep a promise to go for a hike with him. It’s the first time Kevin asserts himself, and as a result they begin to get to know each other a little better. They’ve both been raised by the same woman, Aunt Vivvy, whom Sean muses has “all the warmth of a garden hoe.”

The hike takes them past the back of the cemetery where Sean’s mother and brother Hugh (Kevin’s father) are laid to rest. Sean hasn’t been there since Hugh’s funeral five years ago, and wants to avoid the place. Because of Hugh’s early death, it’s unknown whether he might have been carrying the gene for Huntington’s, a devastating, incurable disease that caused their mother’s demise when they were kids. As a result, Kevin could be at risk for the gene—or not.

Though he’s also at risk, Sean has chosen not to be tested for Huntington’s. As he explains in another chapter, “I didn’t take it. I don’t want to know.” To avoid passing on the disease in case he is a carrier, Sean has never married or had children.

As they hike, it becomes clear that Kevin has an astute eye for detail about the world around him—and about his uncle Sean, as well. This perceptiveness will soon cause Sean to question his own future, as he learns more about the boy’s hidden strengths and the challenges he faces.

Learn more about the book and author at Juliette Fay's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: Deep Down True.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Wild Girls"

Mary Stewart Atwell's short fiction has appeared in Best New American Voices and Best American Mystery Stories.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her debut novel, Wild Girls, and reported the following:

Serendipitously, page 69 of Wild Girls touches on a major theme—the different choices that the main character can make for her life, and the potential consequences of each. At the beginning, we hear a description of Kate’s friend Caroline, an anomalous free spirit at their Southern boarding school:

She wore rainbow-striped kneesocks and John Lennon glasses, and if anyone made fun of the way she looked, the sarcasm passed right over her without making an impression. Her father lived in Rome, and traveling with him had given her a faith in her ability to move in the world that I envied. She was the one who had encouraged me to apply to my dream colleges in Minnesota, Maine, and Vermont when my mom said that maybe I should look for a backup—something less expensive, and closer to home.

Kate and Caroline are separated not only by socioeconomics but also by the confidence that social status brings. As Kate says, Caroline believes in her right to move easily in the world; Kate, brought up in a town without opportunity, suspects that mobility might not be an option for her. Local teenagers have the potential to turn into wild girls, nightmare creatures who wreak havoc on the town and sometimes even murder, and Kate fears becoming one of them.

One might think that the worst thing about being a wild girl would be murdering people, but Kate doesn’t quite see it that way. When she thinks about the wild girls, she often skips past their crimes to focus on their later lives, living in disgrace in the community they terrorized. In the passage below, she reflects on her sister Maggie’s atypical experience as a wild girl and her return to their hometown:

Maybe the fact that my sister had been an unusual kind of wild girl should have been reassuring to me. Maggie had proven that it was possible to come out on the other side without any major baggage. In this she was not just different from Crystal Lemons, dead in the ruins of Bloodwort Farm, but different from the girls who went to prison, who always came back changed, degraded. I had seen Sharon Englehard, drunk at ten a.m., talking to herself at a bus stop, and Angie Davenport was rumored to work as a prostitute at the travel plazas on Route 19. Given the track records of the other ex-wild girls, Maggie’s choice to settle for a deadneck life with Kayak Boy didn’t seem so bad. Still, I couldn’t help noticing that the one thing the wild girls had in common was that they were all stuck in Swan River.

Though Kate sympathizes to a certain extent with the rage that fuels the wild girls’ frenzy, she recognizes that the end result of that frenzy is more shame, more stagnation. If she’s going to get out of Swan River, she has to find a way to channel her own anger and resentment in a positive direction.

Read more about Wild Girls, and visit Mary Stewart Atwell's Facebook page and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Witch of Babylon"

D. J. McIntosh’s The Witch of Babylon has been sold in nineteen countries, was short-listed for the Crime Writers Association Debut Dagger Award, and won a Crime Writers of Canada Arthur Ellis Award for best unpublished novel.

McIntosh applied the Page 69 Test to The Witch of Babylon and reported the following:

From page 69:

Laurel eased herself up and walked over to a credenza pushed against the wall. Every inch of its marble top was covered with stacks of file folders and documents along with some dusty photos sitting beside her computer. One of these, her wedding picture, showed a bride with high cheekbones, a slight Slavic tilt to her green eyes giving her face a faintly exotic look, satiny brown hair, swept up. She was dressed simply in a white satin sheath, holding a spray of white roses and baby’s breath. Beside her, Hal, ramrod straight in a severe black suit, looked uncomfortable, as though he already knew the marriage was doomed to fail. Like some omnipresent ghost, Hal’s mother Mina, a little blurry but clearly identifiable, could be seen in the background. Laurel saw me looking at the photo. “Do you know there isn’t one wedding picture with just the two of us? Mina always lurked somewhere, making sure she was in the shot.

The nexus of conflict in thrillers often focuses on how wrong relationships between people can go and much of the action in The Witch is about just these kind of conflicts. Betrayal, loss, jealousy, the crumbling edifice of a marriage destined for grief from the start, lie at the heart of both the novel’s puzzles and its catastrophic outcome. The stakes are always higher where family ties are broken. The book’s protagonist, John Madison, with family troubles of his own, steps into Hal, Lauren and Mina’s spoiled world, unaware of the consequences to him. And even when it concerns the affairs of a famous and historic king, family repercussions from the loss of a much loved daughter give birth to a legend that lasts centuries.

Learn more about the book and author at D.J. McIntosh's website, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Plague of Lies"

Judith Rock has written on dance, art, and theology for many journals, and has been artist-in-residence and taught and lectured at colleges, seminaries and conferences across the United States and abroad. The Rhetoric of Death, her first novel, was a 2011 Barry Award nominee.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, A Plague of Lies, and reported the following:

In A Plague of Lies, p. 69 is a necessary but uneventful transition between the end of one scene which furthers the plot, and the beginning of another important plot scene. The Jesuit delegation to Louis XIV's Versailles has just presented the gift--or bribe--of a saint's relic to the king's second wife, Madame de Maintenon. They're trying to 'sweeten' her with this gift of St. Ursula's little finger, because the royal wife is very angry at Jesuits. She's angry because the king's Jesuit confessor supports the king's refusal to publicly acknowledge the marriage, the reason being that her family is only minor nobility and not royal. The four man delegation has left her reception room and is on its way to dinner at the table of the Duke de La Rochefoucauld, an important courtier and a friend of the angry Madame de Maintenon. The Jesuits follow the long gallery corridor to the Duke's apartement.

...they found the gallery thronged with richly dressed men and women making their way into La Rochefoucauld's rooms. Charles tried not to stare at the women. Tall headdresses, confections of ribbons, lace, and starched linen, waved above discreetly padded puffs of hair and curls like bunches of grapes, and scarves like woven air fluttered on bare shoulders. The men's gold-embroidered waistcoats glittered beneath open black coats, their sticks tapped, and their velvet and wool coat skirts hung nearly to their knees. Precedence--the prescribed order of entrance by rank--was taken, given, and rearranged with narrowed eyes and coldly honeyed words.

The last sentence is a warning of danger beneath the smooth social surface, and begins the new scene. Historical novelists are often criticized for drowning their readers in historical detail. I try to use detail to deepen or change the mood of a scene. And, of course, to help the reader see what the book's characters are seeing. But I also keep in mind that a novel is not--and is not intended to be--a film. The reader needs enough visual detail to be present with characters and events. But half the fun of reading is conjuring the scene for oneself--rather than having it dictated by the camera. That seems especially important to me in these times when we're inundated with screens and so little is left to the imagination. No matter how much detail a historical novelist gives, in the end it's always imagination that lets the reader of a historical novel travel to a past time and live there for the duration of the story.

Learn more about the book and author at Judith Rock's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty"

Joshilyn Jackson, a native of the Deep South, has worked as an actor and an award-winning teacher, and is now a writer and a mother of two. She is the author of gods in Alabama; Between, Georgia; The Girl Who Stopped Swimming; and Backseat Saints.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, A Grown-Up Kind of Pretty, and reported the following:

A Grown Up Kind of Pretty is set on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, a loamy, fecund, mossy, verdant landscape. It's an impossible place to bury secrets, because anything shoved under that soil is going to put down roots and then sprout up into something huge and vine-y and fast-growing.

The fertility of the region also affected how I imagined the family in the book;Virginia Slocumb is 45, her daughter Liza is 30, and Liza's daughter Mosey is 15. If you do the math, after the equal sign is the idea that Ginny and Liza's main goal in life is to get Mosey to sixteen unpregnant.

Mosey is not that girl. She's a late bloomer who is built like a Twizzler; she's never even been kissed. And yet she's been so helicopter-parented on the issue of her sexuality that she pees on Dollar Store pregnancy tests just to see that second window stay blank and white and clean, a testament that she is not her mother.

Page 69 comes right at the end of Chapter One, and I think it's my favorite page 69 test yet, because it is about the literal unearthing of the book's first buried secret. Earlier in the chapter, Ginny takes out a willow tree, and human remains are found in the Slocumb backyard. This is a bit of a murder mystery and a love story, but under that, it's a story interested in exploring identity: What makes us, us. Our genes? Our histories? How much can we change our essential natures with our choices, our ideals, our belief systems? On Page 69, Mosey and her best friend, Roger, are texting, and they realize the bones under the willow belong to Liza's biological child. Mosey isn't a Slocumb at all. This is her reaction. From page 69:

I felt clear and light, and I felt little bubbles forming all over inside of me, just under my skin. Like when you pour a Sprite and forget about it and all the carbonation sticks to the inside of the glass.

I lifted the phone and read five words. Yes. You could be anybody.

I nodded like Roger was there to see me, and I felt a couple of the little bubbles launch off the sides of me and rise.

There was another Mosey Slocumb. If she had lived, no doubt she would be scared to move because every step took her closer to what everyone already knew she would become. Mosey Slocumb would have to be perfect every second, or else she’d slip and land on her back only to stand up pregnant, or she’d gobble drugs and worship trees like a freak, or she’d end up a bank teller in ugly uniforms so no one noticed she was still cute and she’d live for her kid and her kid’s kids and probably their kids, and she’d never so much as have a date. But I wasn’t that girl.

I was something stolen from someplace so foreign it sounded made up: Miss No One from Nevada. Anonymous from Arizona. My phone buzzed again, but I ignored it. Outside I held my body still, and the lady who had raised me stirred my cocoa, and the big world turned. But inside, the bubbles went running up through me, more and more, until I was fairly popping with them.

I wasn’t me. I wasn’t Mosey Slocumb. It was like weights falling off. I could be anyone, and that meant I might do anything. Any damn thing I felt like. Anything at all.

Learn more about the book and author at Joshilyn Jackson's website and blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Under the Eye of God"

Jerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With nearly 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life. Michael Chabon calls him "one of the most important writers in American literature." New York Newsday hailed Charyn as "a contemporary American Balzac,"and the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers."

Charyn applied the Page 69 Test to his novel Under the Eye of God and reported the following:

This is a perfect entry point into the book. It’s a mirror within a mirror inside another mirror.

Trudy Winckleman, the owner of a bordello in New Orleans, suddenly finds herself in Manhattan impersonating a dead woman, Inez, for the titillation of a multi-millionaire, David Pearl. But something goes awry. She falls in love with one of her own marks, Isaac Sidel, the vice-president-elect of the United States, and she doesn’t really know what to do about it.

In this page [at left, click to enlarge], Trudy, aka Inez, tries to explain to David Pearl that she can no longer live inside his fantastic mirror.

Inez, once a Ziegfeld Follies girl and the mistress of Manhattan’s king of crime, the late Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the World Series of 1919, seems to get constantly in the way of Trudy, David Pearl and Isaac Sidel.

Trudy no longer wants to live in this strange museum on the Upper West Side that David has created for the specter of Inez. But Trudy has two children, and both of them will be in jeopardy if she runs away from David’s “mausoleum.”

So she has to depend on Isaac Sidel, someone who has even less of a future than she has.

Learn more about the book and author at Jerome Charyn's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Blood Lance"

Jeri Westerson is the author of the medieval mysteries featuring Crispin Guest – Veil of Lies, Serpent in the Thorns, The Demon's Parchment, and Troubled Bones.

She applied the Page 69 Test to the latest book in the series, Blood Lance, and reported the following:

Blood Lance has a murder, a relic, and all the medieval goodness of every Crispin Guest novel. But this one also features London Bridge in a starring role. Not only does the action begin there with a body hurtling off the bridge into the churning Thames below and Crispin diving in to dramatically save the hapless fellow--to no avail--but it also features a knight with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (which, of course, wasn't called that then), Spanish spies, the first appearance of John of Gaunt's son Henry Bolingbroke, the reappearance of Geoffrey Chaucer after last year's Troubled Bones, and then ends in a deadly joust on--have you guessed it?--London Bridge, where such things did indeed happen. Crispin soul-searches as he is wont to do, not only the choices he made to have put him in the position of being the Tracker, but decisions he's made since. This Page 69 excerpt is very short because it ends the chapter. It's cryptic but perhaps not too much for those who remember the first Crispin adventure, Veil of Lies.

From page 69:

The portrait weighed heavy in his hand. His fingers rubbed over the surface, loosening as he held it poised over the fire. A knock at the door startled him and, instinctively, he clutched the little frame. Hastily he stuffed it back under the mattress, went to the door, and opened it. Crispin took a staggering step back. In the doorway stood his old friend, Geoffrey Chaucer.

Learn more about the author and her work at Jeri Westerson's website and her "Getting Medieval" blog.

The Page 69 Test: Veil of Lies.

The Page 69 Test: Serpent in the Thorns.

The Page 69 Test: The Demon's Parchment.

My Book, The Movie: The Demon's Parchment.

The Page 69 Test: Troubled Bones.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Fatal Winter"

Winner of the Agatha Award for Death of a Cozy Writer, which initially won the Malice Domestic grant, G. M. Malliet attended Oxford University and holds a graduate degree from the University of Cambridge, the setting for her St. Just mysteries.

She applied the Page 69 Test to A Fatal Winter, the second book in the Max Tudor Series, and found the following:

Page sixty-nine of A Fatal Winter happens to serve two purposes:

My protagonist Max Tudor, village vicar and heartthrob, has taken “neo-Pagan” Awena Owen out to dinner, in part to pay her back for all the meals she’s cooked for him, and in part because he very much enjoys her company. While the Max Tudor mysteries are not romantic-suspense stories, Max’s growing attraction to Awena is a part of the plot, and this gave me an opportunity to have the two characters interact, and to discover for themselves how much they have in common.

Max has just returned from a train journey to London in which he meets the ever-so-patrician Lady Baynard of Chedrow Castle. Awena happens to know a bit about her and her quarrelsome family, and over dinner she tells Max a bit of the family’s history. She also reinforces Max’s initial impressions of the woman, which impressions later turn out to be important to the plot.

At the end of this chapter, Max and Awena are spotted by Miss Pitchford, retired schoolmistress and professional busybody. It is only a matter of minutes before news of this cozy, private dinner goes out over the grapevine. Life in Nether Monkslip is like that: Max and Awena remain blissfully unaware that every milestone of their relationship is being assessed and catalogued.

Learn more about the book and author at G. M. Malliet's website, blog, Facebook page, and Twitter perch.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Touched by an Alien"

Gini Koch lives in Hell's Orientation Area (aka Phoenix, AZ), works her butt off (sadly, not literally) by day, and writes by night with the rest of the beautiful people. She writes the fast, fresh and funny Alien/Katherine “Kitty” Katt series for DAW Books, the Necropolis Enforcement Files series, and the Martian Alliance Chronicles series for Musa Publishing. As G.J. Koch she writes the Alexander Outland series for Night Shade Books. She also writes under a variety of other pen names (including Anita Ensal, Jemma Chase, A.E. Stanton, and J.C. Koch), listens to rock music 24/7, and is a proud comics geek-girl willing to discuss at any time why Wolverine is the best superhero ever (even if Deadpool does get all the best lines). She speaks frequently on what it takes to become a successful author and other aspects of writing and the publishing business.

Koch applied the Page 69 Test to the first novel in her Alien/Katherine “Kitty” Katt series, and found the following:

When I was approached to do this test, it was for a later book in this series. But I looked, and that Page 69 definitely gave away some major spoilers. So, I requested to go back to the beginning and see what Page 69 of my first published novel, Touched by an Alien, would provide.

Katherine “Kitty” Katt has discovered that aliens exist on Earth -- they're here to protect and serve and as a side benefit, they're all gorgeous. Kitty's first experience with aliens -- she kills a newly formed and very dangerous superbeing with a Mont Blanc pen -- landed her on the national news. When you see your child on the national news stopping a “terrorist”, you pick up your phone, regardless of where you are, so Kitty's mother -- who Kitty believes to be a consultant -- calls from New York's JFK airport. Mom indicates there's trouble there, and Kitty and her “new friends” head over to see what's going on. What's going on is an in-control superbeing named Mephistopheles trying to kill a lot of people, Kitty's mother in particular. There's no way Kitty's going to run away or let this big fugly monster hurt her mom, so she grabs a luggage cart…

Score! Hit his knee, and it caused him some problems. We grabbed the next bag and did the same.

Some of the A-C crew saw what we were doing and came over. I didn't know any of them, but I did get to remind myself that if I died right now, I'd be surrounded by five hunks and so could possibly go happy.

Mephistopheles caught on to what we were doing and started to bat at the flying luggage. This caused us to have to dodge hurtling suitcases, but it also meant he was focused on us, not my mother.

I would have been happy about this, only Mom wasn't cooperating. Instead of running away, she headed towards him. She waited until she was in close, then started firing.

The bullets hit, but they didn't penetrate. She used the entire clip, popped it out, reached back, pulled another clip from somewhere, put it in, and fired again. This time, instead of aiming for his torso, she went for the head.

Better results, but still, it was more of a distraction than a deterrent. And he paid more attention to her than our assault with the Luggage of Doom.

Christopher, Martini and Gower were by my mother now. I got the impression they were trying to get her off the offensive and into run away mode. It was certainly what I'd be suggesting right now. But she wasn't having any of it.

Mephistopheles got to his knees and swiped at my mother. I got scared I'd see him kill her. Fear, like tears, made me angry. I didn't think about it, I just ran towards him. “Get away from my mother, you freak of nature!”

Freak of nature is not necessarily the biggest insult one could hurl, but it sure seemed to offend Mephistopheles. He spun towards me, snarling. I still couldn't understand him, but his expression said it clearly -- he didn't care for me.

He reached out and grabbed me. His grip wasn't pleasant, but he wasn't crushing me, either. He had my lower body, so my arms were free. I risked a look around as he stood up. Gower and Christopher each had one of my mother's arms and were dragging her away. Reader was moving the other agents away. And Martini was headed right for us.

I had no idea what he thought he was going to do, but I didn't have a lot of time to ponder, as Mephistopheles brought me up to face level. His eyes were horrible, but as he stared at me I saw them change and look more human. “You are trouble,” he said, and it was in English.

This page is pretty indicative of the book -- science fiction with lots of action and humor and romance, though the romance isn't as obvious on Page 69 as it is on Page 70.

Learn more about the book and author at Gini Koch's website.

--Marshal Zeringue