"The Four Seasons"

Laurel Corona is the author of more than a dozen middle school books and is a professor of English and Humanities at San Diego City College.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Four Seasons, and reported the following:

Page 69. I am squinting without my reading glasses, going back and forth until I have it. Wouldn’t it be great if page 69 had “THIS’LL KNOCK YOUR SOCKS OFF!” written all over it? If it proved beyond a doubt that The Four Seasons was the must-read book of the season, or the year, or (dare I breathe?) forever and ever, amen?

But of course page 69 is nothing like that. It depicts a quiet moment in the dormitory ward of the Ospedale della Pieta, where my two main characters, Maddalena, roughly thirteen, and her sister Chiaretta, three years younger, have lived since being abandoned in infancy. Chiaretta is envious of Maddalena’s drawings of flowers and winged angels in her sketchbook, and she has just managed to save enough money to get her own identical leather-bound book. Maddalena uses her little-practiced handwriting to point out to Chiaretta that they could use the books to write to each other during the interminable hours of enforced silence in the Venetian cloister.

What do I think opening the book to page 69 would tell a prospective reader? That The Four Seasons is about the deep bonds of love and loyalty between two sisters. That despite the many constraints that are placed on introspective Maddalena and exuberant Chiaretta throughout the story, they both manage to live fully and individually. That as an author, I love using tiny details to bring clarity and life to people and situations:

“With the tip of her tongue showing between her teeth, Chiaretta wrote back. ‘You are the most’—she crossed out a word and tried to spell it again—‘maganifacint sister. Now I wont explod before I can tell you my sicrets.’”

Read on! Vivaldi is about to show up and change their lives forever.

Read an excerpt from The Four Seasons, and learn more about the book and author at Laurel Corona's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Cure for Grief"

Nellie Hermann attended Brown University, earning her B.A. in May of 2000. She received her M.F.A. from Columbia University.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her debut novel, The Cure for Grief, and reported the following:

The Cure for Grief focuses on Ruby Bronstein, the youngest and only girl in a family with four children; the book begins when she is nine and ends when she is twenty. Over the course of the book, a series of tragedies strike her close-knit family, but the story remains mostly about how Ruby incorporates her trauma and her grief into her life, trying to remain a “normal” adolescent as she tamps down around what makes her different. Her father is a holocaust survivor, and she uses his example as inspiration for her ultimate conclusion, hard won, that she must embrace life—along with her fears—in order to live.

On page 69, Ruby is fourteen and in Prague with her parents; they have come to go back to the concentration camp that her father was imprisoned in. Ruby describes her parents, and her conflicted feelings towards her father, whom she feels cannot understand her because of the difference in their backgrounds. I’m not sure page 69 is representative of the whole of The Cure for Grief because it is not particularly wrenching, as much of the book inarguably is. I do think though that the page is representative of the general style of the novel in that it gives us Ruby’s interior, a view of the Bronstein family through her eyes, and a glimpse of the sensitive young girl who is at the heart of the book.

Ruby had always had difficulty relating to [her father], but in the last few years, as she grew, it had gotten worse. None of her friends had fathers who came to “inspect” their rooms two or three times after they cleaned them, who insisted they be home every Friday night, who made them set the table though their brothers never had to, who would allow them only two hours of TV a week. None of her friends had fathers who never came to their sporting events but who attended all of their violin recitals; who would never let them out of Hebrew school, ever; who wouldn’t let them go to the mall on Saturdays. Her father had no idea what it was like to be her! Many pages of Ruby’s journal were covered with her furious scrawl, the words I HATE YOU ripped into the pages from pressing too hard. She’d always feel guilty afterward and try to cross it out, writing no I don’t in the margins just in case somebody ever read it.

She rarely felt this way about her mother, but Ruby was her mother’s baby; after three boys, she was the gift her mother had always wanted. And just by being an American, and by being a woman, and by having had two parents her whole life, Ruby’s mother was able to understand more about Ruby than her father ever could. Like her father, her mother had come a long way from home: she was Jewish now, whereas she had been raised Catholic; she had money now, whereas she had not when she was younger. As Ruby saw it, both her parents had come from nothing to something—her mother from a four-room apartment with five occupants and her father from a kibbutz with a house full of other young people (not to mention the concentration camp, or the Israeli army barracks)—they had come from other worlds where they had learned the value of the life they lived now in the land of suburbia, and the value of the life they gave to their children.

Read an excerpt from The Cure for Grief, and learn more about the author and her work at Nellie Hermann's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mama Does Time"

Like the main character in her "Mace Bauer Mysteries," Deborah Sharp's family roots were set in Florida long before Walt Disney and Miami Vice came to define the state. She is a former, longtime reporter for USA Today.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Mama Does Time, and reported the following:

Mama Does Time is billed as the debut in my Florida-set "Mace Bauer Mystery'' series. My first novel, the publicity materials say.

Not true. It's my first published novel. Like a lot of reporters, I had a dusty, incomplete book in my desk forever. When I left USA Today, I finally finished it. And it reeked.

Point of view veered madly. The protagonist (a female reporter … how original!) was so prickly, even I hated her. And the manuscript was too short by 150 pages.

I tossed it, and started from scratch. I wound up with an offbeat mystery with a down-home edge: Think Agatha Christie meets TV's "My Name is Earl.''

With Mama, I took the time to develop the characters and their story, triumphing over the journalistic urge to reveal too much, too soon.

Mama's a much-married Southern gal with sherbet-colored pantsuits and a penchant for mischief. She gets in trouble for real when a body in her convertible ties her to murder. Unless daughter Mace can find the true culprit, Mama goes to prison—just like in a tacky country song.

Page 69 is not flat-out funny, like other parts of the book. But it's a good representation of character and story. With Mama in jail, the seemingly shady Sal has summoned Mace to a meeting. He's Mama's would-be husband No. 5. The page reveals the disdain the outdoorsy Mace feels for the posh developments spreading across her once-wild, native Florida. It also casts suspicion on the mysterious Sal, as Mace will face peril on a deserted road within two pages...

"... floodlights illuminated ornate pillars marking the entrance to the community. 'Himmarshee Haven,' they said in cursive script. 'Luxurious Country Living.' Talk about your oxymorons. Most of the country lives I know have very little luxury.

The Jeep bounced over a series of speed bumps as I made my way past Victorian-style homes with gingerbread trim and two-car garages. The driveways featured golf carts parked behind white picket fences. Not a double-wide trailer or swamp buggy in sight ...''

(Mace parks at the subdivision's nearly deserted golf course. Sal's showy car is nowhere to be seen, so she goes into the pro shop to wait. Inside, she kills time by buying pink, mint green, and baby blue golf socks for her pastel-crazy sister, Marty.)

"As I handed over my credit card, I asked the college-aged kid at the register whether he'd seen a gargantuan golfer with a heavy New York accent.

'Sure, Big Sal.' The kid sucked on a breath mint. I could smell cinnamon clear across the counter. 'He was in here about thirty, forty minutes ago. Then he got a call on his cell phone and high-tailed it outside. I heard the tires on his Cadillac squealing as he pulled out of the lot. Guess he was in a hurry to get somewhere.'

He pushed my receipt across the glass display case, which held dimpled golf balls and leather gloves. 'Sign that, would you? And I'll need to see some ID.'

I gave him my driver's license. He held it up and inspected it like he was a customs agent at the airport and I was smuggling (heroin) ..."

Listen to an excerpt from Mama Does Time, and learn more about the book and author at Deborah Sharp's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Dracula Dossier"

James Reese is the author of The Herculine Trilogy.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Dracula Dossier, and reported the following:

On page 69 of The Dracula Dossier, the protagonist, Bram Stoker – yes, that Bram Stoker, author of Dracula – is midway through a letter to his good friend, the writer Thomas Henry Hall Caine. The two men have remained friends despite Caine’s status as the bestselling author of the day and Stoker’s abiding frustration at failing to publish anything of note. (Ironic that Stoker lives on today – not to mention his Count – while Caine is forgotten.)

The novel mirrors Dracula in structure: letters, journals, newspaper clippings, etc. And in this early letter Stoker is addressing the ennui, the domestic doldrums that will soon lead him to accept an invitation to a meeting of a secret, occult society, the Order of the Golden Dawn.

Alas, domestic life has come to seem naught but a circle of anger and apology, a circle set to turning, day in and day out, by the silence of all that is left unsaid. It verily leeches the life-blood from me…

Not the first allusion to blood in The Dracula Dossier, and not the last. In fact, the whole premise of the novel is a bloody one, predicated upon these What ifs?

What if Stoker did indeed accept the invitation of a friend (none other than Wm. Butler Yeats, in this case) and agreed to attend a meeting of the Golden Dawn?

What if, at this meeting – featuring certain rites and rituals of ancient Egypt – something went horribly wrong?

And what if all this led to Stoker’s becoming involved with one Francis Tumblety, formerly a close friend of Hall Caine’s and today’s primary suspect in the Jack the Ripper murders?

The Dracula Dossier supposes that the above actually happened – as indeed it could have – and further, that Stoker’s run-in with the Ripper became the basis of his immortal novel, written a few years later.

Page 69 also mentions another historical character in the book, Lady Jane Wilde, mother of Oscar, or As-car, as she puts it. Together with Caine and Lady Wilde, Stoker will set out after the Ripper.

There’s a whole lot of history in the novel, and the reader is led through some of it via footnotes (like the one on pp. 69) written by the fictional “Count de Ville,” finder of The Dracula Dossier; which – in good Gothic fashion – is Stoker’s “lost” journal of the year 1888.

Browse inside the Dracula Dossier, and learn more about the author and his work at James Reese's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Bowling Across America"

Mike Walsh is one of the world’s leading authorities on the geographic nuances of rented footwear. A graduate of Miami University, he grew up in a family of six children in Upper Arlington, Ohio. He lives in Chicago within walking distance of four bowling alleys.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new book, Bowling Across America: 50 States in Rented Shoes, and reported the following:

There are few pages in Bowling Across America that don't have to do with bowling, pertinent details of the geography at hand, or some effort at poignancy via the inspiring story of someone I encountered during the trip. Page 69 is one of those pages. It is entirely a throw-away opening to a chapter on Pennsylvania that I use to set up tension that arises later in pages 70-71. In fact, due to clever page design, 69 is only 1/2 the page long, as a "handwritten" chart/illustration that it sets up was too big to fit in the space remaining on 69.

But, the page does include the book's sole mention of Burt Reynolds, and, thankfully, the only paraphrasing of the Deliverance line, "He sure got a pretty mouth!"

Learn more about the book and author at the Bowling Across America website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Veil of Lies"

Jeri Westerson is a journalist, first time novelist, and noted blogger on things mysterious and medieval.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Veil of Lies, and reported the following:

So here I am doing the page 69 test, and I see on said page of Veil of Lies, a variety of things.

First off, it's probably a good idea to tell you a little about Veil of Lies. It has a subtitle: A Medieval Noir. Enigmatic? I hope so. Veil of Lies is a medieval mystery, but features a hard-boiled detective. This gives it a unique spin, making it a little darker and edgier than your average medieval mystery. My protagonist, Crispin Guest, is a disgraced and down-on-his-luck knight turned detective on the mean streets of 14th century London, who's hired by a wealthy and reclusive merchant to spy on his wife whom he suspects of infidelity. When Crispin witnesses her tryst and reports back to the merchant, he makes the unpleasant discovery of the merchant's murder in a locked room, throwing Crispin into involvement in murder, international intrigue, a beautiful femme fatale, and a mysterious religious relic at the heart of these crimes.

On page 69, we can see the cunning Crispin at work, as well as his cutpurse cum servant, Jack Tucker, an eleven-year-old waif who has insinuated himself into Crispin's life. Crispin asks Jack to borrow the merchant's bookkeeping ledgers, even as the dead merchant is lying in state in the same room. Crispin is puzzled by the locked room scenario: how the man could have been murdered inside the room when the window showed no signs of entry. The wheels in his acute mind begin to turn and he starts to investigate the possibilities.

It's difficult to determine if someone would be intrigued enough by the exchange on this one page to read on. One would hope so. It offers a sense of the time period, giving little snippets of details that Crispin sees around him, details that do not surprise a man of his time. But it also offers a sliver of insight into both main characters' deportment, how they think and react to a given situation.

A sample:

...He moved past an alcove and found a door. He knocked first, but without waiting for a reply, tried to open it. Locked. He glanced back at Jack, wondering if he should send him to get a key when he decided not to waste the time. He unbuttoned his coat and he crouched and used his dagger and the sharp aiglet of his shirt's lace to pick the lock. It snapped opened and Jack, straining to watch from his post by the solar, smiled.

It's a good example of their relationship, something like father and son, mentor and protégé that is central to Crispin's having been thrust into this predicament of losing his place in society in the first place: his own mentor/protégé relationship with the duke of Lancaster is the reason he committed treason eight years ago.

But that is for another page.

Learn more about the book and author at Jeri Westerson's website, her "Getting Medieval" blog, and the Crispin Guest Medieval Noir blog.

Westerson wrote about Crispin Guest's place among fictional detectives for The Rap Sheet.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Body in the Record Room"

Joe Barone was raised on the grounds of a state mental hospital in the 1950's. He is a retired ordained minister who lives in Missouri.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new mystery novel The Body in the Record Room, and reported the following:

Can a state hospital mental patient who thinks he is the cowboy hero Roy Rogers resolve a decades-old murder in the town of Sunrise? Set in the 1950's, The Body in the Record Room is the story of Roy Rogers, his friend Harry, and Harry's dog Bullet. Roy finds a body in the hospital record room, and that leads him to investigate a murder that happened in the town of Sunrise 20 years ago.

Page 69 reflects something of the humor and humanity in the book. That page opens a chapter. The hospital superintendent, the little man, is coming across the ward. The chapter opening is told, as is the whole book, in Roy's voice:

I wasn't surprised when I saw the little man coming across the ward. I even braced myself for what he would probably have to say. But it didn't happen that way.

"You and Harry cause a lot of trouble," he said with a smile.

I just stood there.

"You don't have to tell me where you all were keeping the little dog. Dr. Jane has said she'll take it now. That way, she'll have a pet. She can get its shots and all, and after a while Harry can go down and visit Bullet–That's his name, right?– any time he wants to."

"She's a nice lady," I said.

"Of course she's a nice lady. She even disinfected the little emergency room herself. Do you know how hard it is to disinfect a place like that?"

The book contrasts a terrible crime (life-changing child abuse) with the humanity of people such as the book's Roy Rogers, Harry, Dr. Jane and the little man. It shows how an initial evil can lead to several murders. It also shows how the examples of great heroes (the real Roy Rogers and Dale Evans) change people's lives.

Learn more about the book and author at Joe Barone's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"All the Windwracked Stars"

Elizabeth Bear was born on the same day as Frodo and Bilbo Baggins, but in a different year. She is the author of eight sf/f novels, including A Companion to Wolves with Sarah Monette.

Bear applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, All the Windwracked Stars, and reported the following:

Page 69 of All the Windwracked Stars in its entirety is as follows:

The glass wall to the courtyard admitted natural light, three stories' worth. Much of the main room had always been open space, high and airy for the absent mill machines. Where it had not been, Muire had torn out the second and third floors, leaving only the support members—beams thick with the memory of such trees as no longer grew on Valdyrgard, notched into the red-brick walls—and a four hundred square foot section of the overseer's office, reached by an iron spiral stair, as her apartment.

For now, the whole space stood empty and full of morning light, the only motion her neighbor in the courtyard, his head down over his watering. She didn't garden, herself, and it seemed a kind of sin to let it go uncultivated.

Within the door, she paused and threw the locks. The evidence of her long tenure was everywhere in her studio. The slate floor was scarred, and splashed metal had congealed in gouges left by the feet of giant machines. She hung Nathr on her hook, stripped off the ruins of her cloak—fumbling one-handed—and left a trail of armor behind her as she staggered toward the shower. And if her neighbor happened to glance up and catch a glimpse of her sexlessly bony frame right now, she couldn't be bothered to care.

The water was hot, at least, the catch basin on the rooftop full after last night's downpour. The pressure dropped occasionally—Sig filling his watering can or rinsing his hands—but Muire didn't care, any more than she cared about the soap and water squelching unpleasantly between her skin and the inflatable cast.

The hot water was strength, at least temporary strength, and she took it, leaning against the wall of the shower, eyes closed, breathing.
***

This is page 2 of Chapter 5, and what's going on here is that Muire, the primary protagonist of the novel, has just gotten home after a very bad night and a visit to the emergency room. She's marshaling her resources to return for round two of the fight she just lost conclusively. It's an aftermath and an interlude scene, and while the book itself has rather more action than you'll see on this page, I think in a lot of ways it is representative of the book.

One of the core themes of AtWS is about the stubborn persistence of life, and Muire is demonstrating that here. Battered, defeated, nursing a broken arm, she's withdrawn to her place of safety--but she has no intention of staying there. She's gathering herself to go back out and do what she has to do, despite overwhelming odds.

This is a brief respite, in other words, one that cannot last, and the puttering of her unassuming neighbor in his post-apocalyptic urban garden is meant to provide a counterpoint to that. Muire fights, she risks her life for the greater good as she perceives it--and around her, the daily business of existence goes on. The vegetables have to be watered and weeded. If you lose a fight, even if you survive, afterwards you still have to wash the blood and broken glass out of your hair.

Read excerpts from All the Windwracked Stars, and learn more about the author and her work at Elizabeth Bear's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Final Exposure"

Steve Carlson has been a working actor and screenwriter for more than thirty years. In his varied career, he has been a series regular on General Hospital, Young and the Restless, and A New Day in Eden on Showtime. He has also guest-starred in hundreds of hours of television and starred or costarred in ten feature films. Steve has written feature films, television episodes, and books on working in acting. Last year he applied the Page 69 Test to his novel, Almost Graceland.

Now he has applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Final Exposure, and reported the following:

Most people want the world to be a little different, hopefully better, for their having lived. Sometimes murder comes along and snuffs out a life before those changes were made manifest.

That was the case in my mystery Final Exposure. David and Rebecca Collier were starting over. He was giving up being an attorney to be a writer and she was quitting the world of escrow to pursue her passion, photography. They had just purchased a little beach house and were as happy as two people could be.

... Until one day when a man came to the front door and shot Rebecca in the head.

David was also shot but would live… sort of.

David was devastated. Rebecca was his life. Who would want to kill her? Why? And why did someone still want David dead? Another attempt was made on his life before he even left the hospital. What did they think he knew?

Rebecca’s legacy never got left. She wasn’t given the time. David’s obsession with that fact took him into the world that got her killed. It was important. There had to be more of their love and lives than some old law cases and escrows.

For his own protection David was told to get out of town and lay low for a while. Page 69 picked up toward the end of this exile where David was realizing it wasn’t working. He needed to do something, to be involved.

“… he also made another promise; this one to himself but with all the depth and intensity he could muster. The killer of Rebecca would be caught. He would not get away with it. To have Rebecca dead and her killer walking around was unacceptable. That would not happen.”

David had no idea what he was walking into… as he found out, he realized his life would never be the same again.

Read more about the book and author at Steve Carlson's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Wettest County in the World"

Matt Bondurant received a B.A. and an M.A. in English at James Madison University and a Ph.D. at Florida State University where he was a Kingsbury Fellow. His short fiction has appeared in journals such as Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, and New England Review, among others. His first novel, The Third Translation, was sold in fifteen countries.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Wettest County in the World, and reported the following:

I was hoping that page 69 might contain a grisly bit of knifing or perhaps a good punch in the face, but no such luck. Lucky for me page 69 offers a nice slice of the heart of the novel, particularly as it pertains to the central character, Jack. This page tries to describe the conflicting internal forces that drive a young man to do glorious and terrible things. It also describes the fearful awe that Jack holds for his older brother Howard, who seems to absorb all manner of punishment with silent, grim aplomb. Jack wanted nothing more than to be like Howard and his ilk, but now that he is part of their company he finds it cold and unsatisfying. He knows that he must seek out other worlds. Actually, this page is probably as good as any in the book if a reader wants a sense of what it is about and how it is written.

Pg. 69 excerpt:

Howard would add a good thick chestnut stump to the fire and stir the coals for the night and Jack would gaze up at the tree-mottled night sky, his face reddened by the sun and his eyes shining, and tell Howard what he was going to do once he got some money together, the new boots he would buy, the automobile, how he would blast out of the county and head west or maybe north, to the open country. When Jack drank he grew expansive and good natured, continually convinced of the infinite possibility of the world. He told vivid tales of fantastic dreams, of the spaces beneath the mountains he visited in his sleep. He laughed and gazed about at the faces of people around him and clumsily attempted to describe just what amazing creatures they all were. Afterwards people would lie in their racks at night staring at the dusty timbers of a ceiling and wonder just what that boy was all about anyway?

Aw hell, Jack would say, there ain’t no real way to say it.

Go on, Howard said.

Jack peeled off his boots and vigorously rubbed his blistered and raw feet.

Go on.

At the corn shucking Jack grit his teeth and passed the jar with Howard and kicked at stray corn husks in the barn while the others ate. Jack surveyed the greedy faces at the supper table, sopping their biscuits in souse meat drippings, dirt farmers who would never have a spot of good clothing on them, he thought how sad and ridiculous and hypocritical their life seemed and how unaware they were of it. It was a bitter sense of righteousness; standing now alongside those men against the wall, Jack felt strangely cold in their company. He somehow envisioned that the other side carried its own sun, its own source of heat. Instead it was as frozen and remote as the principles of machinery, as the first star of winter. And they were broke besides.

No ‘count.

He looked at Howard’s heavy, passive face, standing there in the barn, his throat working slowly. None of it mattered to him, Jack thought, Howard didn’t give a fig and never would.

Read an excerpt from The Wettest County in the World, and learn more about the author and his work at Matt Bondurant's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"By Chance"

Martin Corrick is the author of the acclaimed debut novel, The Navigation Log. He holds an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia and for much of his working life was a university lecturer, but he has also worked as a journalist and copywriter.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, By Chance, and reported the following:

One night in the winter of 2001 a man named Gary Hart was driving down a motorway in England. He fell asleep and his vehicle veered off the road, went through a gap in the roadside barrier and finished on a railway line. Hart was uninjured. He called the police, but was still talking on his phone when a fast passenger train hit his vehicle and then collided with an oncoming coal train. Ten people died and forty were seriously injured.

Gary Hart was put on trial. The popular press called him a murderer. Crowds gathered outside the court, screaming and spitting at the accused man as he passed. The judge said that Hart was the sole cause of the accident and must accept all the blame; he was found guilty of causing death by dangerous driving and sentenced to five years in prison.

But Gary Hart had no harmful intent; he simply fell asleep at the wheel. Hands up if you have done the same, or come close to it. He fell asleep, which happens very often; but in this case a series of unlikely coincidences combined to make it a tragedy. It is an excellent example of the operation of what philosophers call 'moral luck': guilt and innocence, it seems, are frequently determined by chance.

Hence my novel. It concerns an ordinary man – a simple, innocent man – who yet commits a terrible act, a blameworthy act, after which his life takes an extraordinary and unpredictable turn. On page 69 the central character – his name is James Bolsover – is struggling to write a story. He is a technical writer, an engineer without experience in fiction, and he is writing a story because he is in despair. He has married a young and lovely woman, only to find that she is nervous and shy – afraid of sex, afraid of making love. Now he is trying to charm her, entice her, with a bedtime story, and thereby draw her into his arms. The story is a romance of a traditional kind – stolen in part from Romeo and Juliet – whose climax is about to be reached. Very soon we will discover whether Bolsover's plan will work, and how its outcome will affect the rest of his life.

Learn more about By Chance at the Random House website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Third Strike"

Zoë Sharp's professional writing career began in 2001 with Killer Instinct, the first Charlie Fox book. This novel was followed by Riot Act, Hard Knocks, and First Drop, which earned a nomination for a Barry Award for Best British Crime Novel. Road Kill and Second Shot are the fifth and sixth titles in the series.

Sharp applied the Page 69 Test to her new Charlie Fox novel, Third Strike, and reported the following, beginning with page 69:

Eight

“Take the next lane coming up on the right,” I said. “The house is about a mile and a half further down, on the right.”

The instructions were probably unnecessary. Sean had been to my parents’ place on at least three occasions over the years, which meant he could have found it again blindfolded. He had that annoyingly uncanny sense of direction.

Now, I clutched for the center armrest as the Shogun swayed violently. “And can you please try and remember they still drive on the left over here? These roads are too narrow to go bowling down the middle at this speed.”

“I haven’t forgotten,” Sean said mildly, not slackening his pace. “I’m just making best use of the visibility – hedging my bets.”

“Hedge will be the operative word if you meet one of the locals towing a trailer with half a ton of horse in it,” I snapped.

“Calm down, Charlie,” Sean said, sounding irritatingly placid. “We need to decide how we’re going to handle this. We don’t know what – if anything – we’re walking into.”

“Simple,” I said, aware of a tightness in my chest that made it difficult to breathe. “We knock on the front door and, if there’s anyone I don’t recognize in the house with her, we kick the shit out of them and go home. Next?”

He pursed his lips as he stuck the unwieldy four-by-four into a narrow, blind left-hander, his movements deceptively slow when things seemed to be happening around him so fast.

“In essence, I like it,” he said lightly. “What it lacks in style it makes up for in dumb simplicity.” His voice hardened. “What makes you think you’ll get further than the threshold before they cut her throat?”

His choice of words was deliberate, I knew. It jolted me out of my focused little bubble of anger, made my hand stray automatically towards my own throat, to the fading scar that lay hidden beneath the high neck of my sweater.

When Marshal invited me to do the Page 69 or Page 99 test on the previous book in the Charlie Fox series, Second Shot, I was disconcerted to discover that neither page was, I felt, quite representative of the rest of the book. However, I’m delighted to report that Page 69 of Third Strike is much closer to the mark.

My former soldier-turned-bodyguard heroine, Charlie, has just landed back in the UK from New York, together with her partner, Sean, having rescued her highly respected – and respectable – consultant surgeon father from a police raid on a brothel in one of the seedier areas of Brooklyn. (Don’t ask – it’s a ‘you had to be there’ moment.) They suspect that her mother is in some kind of danger in the family home in Cheshire, and are hurrying there to find out what, and who, is responsible. Getting in will require a mix of guile and aggression that makes Charlie and Sean so good at their job. What follows was a fun scene to write and, I hope, a fun scene to read.

Read an excerpt from Third Strike, and learn more about the author and her work at Zoë Sharp's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue