"The Magicians"

Lev Grossman is Time magazine's book critic as well as one of its lead technology writers. The New York Times says he's “among this country's smartest and most reliable critics.”

He published his first novel, Warp, in 1997. His second novel, Codex, came out in 2004 and became an international bestseller.

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

Page 69 finds us in Chapter 5 of The Magicians, which is called “Snow.” So far the following things have happened. Our hero Quentin, who is 17 and very unhappy, has been invited to take the entrance exam at a very secret, very exclusive college for magicians -- real magicians, the kind who cast real spells. Being an exceptionally intelligent young man, he passes the exam and matriculates at the Brakebills College for Magical Pedagogy.

He soon finds that the other 20 students in his class are, like him, very bright and rather eccentric. He also begins to realize that magic works a bit differently from how he expected. It’s a lot harder to do, and its purpose is a lot less clear. There’s no Voldemort to fight. So what’s magic for?

Now, towards the end of his first semester, he’s studying and practicing for his first final exam at Brakebills. It’s the night before the test, and he’s been up for days cramming with two other students, one of whom is a terribly shy girl named Alice. Quentin goes to take a midnight walk in the snow (it’s November, and Brakebills is in upstate New York) to clear his head. To his surprise, Alice asks if she can come with him.

They have an interesting conversation. Quentin discovers, among other things, that Alice wasn’t invited to Brakebills the way he was. She had to find her way in by herself, which you’re not supposed to be able to do -- the school is magically concealed from outsiders:

“They couldn’t believe it,” Alice says. “Nobody’s supposed to be able to find the House by themselves. They thought it was just an accident, but it’s so obvious there’s old magic here, tons of it. This whole place is wild with it -- if you look at it through the right spells, it lights up like a forest fire.

“They must have thought I was a homeless person. I had twigs in my hair. I’d been crying all night. Professor Van der Weghe felt sorry for me. She gave me coffee and let me take the entrance Exam all by myself. Fogg didn’t want to let me, but she made him.”

In some ways this is an atypical page -- it’s a quiet moment in the plot, of which there aren’t all that many. But in other ways it’s actually a very appropriate one to pull out. It’s one of Quentin’s growing-up moments, when he realizes that he’s not the only one who has problems, and that his problems are actually pretty insignificant compared to a lot of other people’s. He changes -- his world suddenly expands, in that way that only happens when you’ve been acting like kind of a self-centered asshole, and you suddenly realizes it, and you know all at once that you’re not going to do that anymore in the future, ever.

Read an excerpt from The Magicians, and learn more about the book and author at Lev Grossman's website and The Magicians website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dead Write"

Like her Forensic Handwriting Mysteries series (Penguin/Obsidian) character, Claudia Rose, Sheila Lowe is a real-life court-qualified handwriting expert who testifies in handwriting-related cases. She's a frequent guest in the media when there are interesting handwritings to comment on, such as a recent Dateline NBC, discussing the Clark Rockefeller case. She is also the author of the bestselling Complete Idiot's Guide to Handwriting Analysis, and Handwriting of the Famous & Infamous, as well as the award-winning Sheila Lowe's Handwriting Analyzer software.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to Dead Write, the new Claudia Rose mystery, and reported the following:

I'd never heard of the Page 69 test, but turning to page 69 of Dead Write was an eye-opening exercise. There, revealed, was the truth about handwriting expert Claudia Rose's assignment in New York. It's an unsettling revelation that makes Claudia want to turn around and head back to the West Coast on the next flight out.

Her new client, Baroness Grusha Olinetsky, a high-priced matchmaker, has brought Claudia to the Big Apple, claiming that her previous handwriting expert made some serious mistakes. What Olinetsky failed to reveal was that those mistakes had led to the unfortunate deaths of several of her clients. On page 69, Claudia begins to uncover information that reveals the far more serious implications of those deaths. It suddenly becomes clear to her that there's a darker motive behind her client's urgent desire to get her on a plane.

Struggling with her own demons, which include dealing with the recent violent death of a friend (in Written in Blood), Claudia isn't interested in getting involved in another sinister situation. But then her personal life intrudes and changes her outlook.

Dead Write, page 69:

As she skimmed through photos that had been shot at a charity fund-raiser the year before, her gaze caught on another familiar figure at the black tie event: Grusha Olinetsky, recognizable, despite platinum blonde hair, rather than her current jet black, but twisted into the same French roll she still favored.

Pear-shaped diamonds dangled from her ears and glittered across her throat. A clingy gold lamé strapless gown showed off pale shoulders. Grusha's gloved arm was tucked possessively through Bernard's and his hand covered hers.

Claudia clicked the back button and paged through some of the other links without finding anything of interest. What she had discovered about Ryan Turner and Shellee Jones left her with the almost certain knowledge that she had been duped into coming here. She went and poured herself a glass of tap water from the bathroom faucet and downed a vitamin.

What game is Grusha playing with me?

It was a question Claudia intended to ask her client. But first, she would keep the appointments that Sonya had made for her with the club's doctors. She would glean whatever information she could arm herself with before the inevitable confrontation with Grusha Olinetsky.

Returning to the laptop, she tried one last search, this time on John Shaw, whose file was the last in the pile. But even with the additional demographics she entered, the name was too common to bring up anything useful.

Maybe no news is good news for him, she thought, contemplating the array of perplexing information she had accumulated so far:

Ten fancy leather file folders, three dead clients.

Read an excerpt from Dead Write, and learn more about the book and author at the Claudia Rose Forensic Handwriting Mysteries series website.

My Book, The Movie: Sheila Lowe's Written in Blood and Poison Pen.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Best Served Cold"

Joe Abercrombie is the author of The First Law trilogy: The Blade Itself, Before They Are Hanged, and Last Argument of Kings. In 2008 he was a finalist for the John W. Campbell award for best new writer.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to Best Served Cold, a standalone book set in the same world as The First Law trilogy, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Best Served Cold (in the US hardcover, anyway) features a very unpleasant revenge killing, in which a man is garrotted then has his head bashed in with a hammer. Ouch. Since Best Served Cold is the tale of a ruthless woman seeking revenge on the seven men who left her brother dead and her nearly dead, it is not entirely unrepresentative of the content. It’s quite a violent book.

Funnily enough, page 69 of the UK hardcover features a woman engaged in a battle of wits with a treacherous master poisoner while they trade amusing small talk. Since Best Served Cold is the tale of a rogue’s gallery of bizarre characters including a psychopath obsessed by numbers, the world’s least reliable drunkard, a poisoner’s apprentice who can’t stop eating, a hard-bitten female torturer, and a duke with a urine fetish, this is also not entirely unrepresentative of the content. It’s quite an amusing book.

Read an excerpt from Best Served Cold, and learn more about the author and his work at Joe Abercrombie's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Breathing Water"

Timothy Hallinan is the author of the acclaimed Poke Rafferty Bangkok thrillers and other books.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to Breathing Water, the third Poke Rafferty novel, and reported the following:

Let's see the hand of everyone who doesn't believe in serendipity. Okay, you can leave the room, all of you. You fail the class in advance.

Page 69 of my new Bangkok thriller, Breathing Water, states for the first time in the book the position in which my protagonist, Poke Rafferty, will find himself for the remainder of the story, which is to say poised precariously between two immense grinding wheels that could turn him and his little family to processed flour without a moment's hesitation.

And how did he get there? He won, in a poker game, the right to write the biography of one of Bangkok's most mysterious billionaires, a dark-skinned (that's important) former peasant from Isaan, the country's impoverished Northeast region. Pan, the billionaire, is the poster child for conspicuous consumption – he's built the Garden of Eden on the grounds of his estate, for one thing – and he delights in using his money to smear questionable substances beneath the noses of Thailand's elite (light-skinned) governing class. Oh, and he's prevented several previous biographies from reaching the public; one of them was abandoned only after the printing press burned down.

The morning after Poke wins the the right to do the book, he finds a story about it in the newspaper. By 7 AM, his life and those of his wife and daughter have been threatened if he writes the book. By 10 AM, he's been kidnapped, hooded, and told by his captors that he and his wife and children will die if he doesn't write the book.

The kidnappers drop him off on a nameless little street in Bangkok's Indian section, and when he pulls the pillowcase off his head, he's alone with some very uncomfortable thoughts.

... and today, the displays of naked power.

The floor plan to his apartment. His bank account and cell phone numbers. The kind of power most foreigners never experience.

Rafferty knows Thailand well enough to be aware that people above a certain social and political level are virtually unaccountable .... These are the people, the “big people,” whom Rose despises, the people who attend dress balls with blood on their hands. There are not many of them, relatively speaking, but they have immense mass and they exert a kind of gravity that bends tens of thousands of lives into the orbit of their will.

Most foreigners pass through the gravitational Gordian knot of Bangkok unscathed, like long-haul comets for whom our solar system is just something else to shoulder their way past. Foreigners have no formal status here. They come and go. They dimple the surface of the city's space-time like water-striding insects, staying a few months at a time and then flitting elsewhere. They don't have enough mass to draw the gaze of the individuals around whom the orbits wheel.

But Rafferty is being gazed at. And he knows all the way to the pit of his stomach that it's the worst thing that can happen to him. If these people decide it is in their best interest, they can blow through him and his cobbled-together family like a cannonball through a handkerchief.

If he goes in one direction, Rose and Miaow are in danger. If he goes in the other direction, Rose and Miaow are in danger. And “in danger” is a euphemism.

He pushes himself free of the building on legs that feel as numb as prosthetics, and makes his way down the soi to the boulevard.

Where he stops, looking left, then right. Which way to go?

Both directions are wrong, but one must be less wrong than the other.

The book is based on the very real power struggle that is currently threatening to tear the Kingdom of Thailand apart. Rafferty will get out of this alive only with the help of Bangkok's poorest and least powerful inhabitants, including street children. His family's lives will depend on whether, at least in the short run, the small can bring down the great.

Read an excerpt from Breathing Water, and learn more about the book and author at Timothy Hallinan's website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: A Nail Through the Heart.

The Page 69 Test: The Fourth Watcher.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Bad Day for Sorry"

Sophie Littlefield grew up in rural Missouri. Like her heroine, she enjoys quilting and sewing. She lives with her husband and two teenage children near San Francisco, California.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new novel, A Bad Day for Sorry, and reported the following:

So much of my book has to do with the way women see themselves and each other – and with the way middle age can bring a determination to be true to oneself. I have this theory that self-acceptance just naturally leads to un-judgemental-ism, and I used my character, Stella Hardesty, as a vehicle to get that across.

Stella spent most of her first fifty years towing the line. She was a good housewife, a helpful neighbor, and she worked hard to play nice and do what society expected of her – even when that meant sublimating her own opinions and desires, and even when that meant keeping quiet about her husband’s physical and verbal abuse.

One day she kills the son of a bitch. This act, which goes unpunished by the law, unleashes a whole unstoppable torrent of won’t-back-down. With nothing left to lose, Stella sheds her timidity like a worn-out apron and never looks back.

Now she’s found herself unexpectedly in a position to help other women deal with their own abusers. She sets up a sideline business of beating, threatening, and intimidating these men until they’re “rehabilitated.” Her reputation spreads by word of mouth and she soon has all the clients she can handle. In dealing with these women, who come from every walk of life, Stella has to examine all the little judgments she’s been carrying around about other women – judgments that she’s picked up from half a century of societal pressure and media input and small-town gossip-mongering.

On page 69, she’s discovered that her young client, Chrissy Shaw, has not been entirely forthcoming about her personal life. Chrissy has failed to mention that she’s been seeing – in addition to several other suitors - an ex who may or may not be a suspect in the kidnapping of her baby.

Page 69:

“You’ve been seeing Pitt,” Stella said.

Chrissy shrugged. “Not regular or anything. Just, you know, sometimes.”

Stella heaved a sigh. “You know, back when you first came to talk to me, I told you that I had to know everything. Remember? Don’t leave anything out, I told you, because every detail counts, even the ones that might not seem important at the time. Well, I surely wish I wasn’t only finding out about Pitt now.”

“I’m sorry,” Chrissy said, staring down at her hands. “It’s just…I didn’t want you to think I was…”

She swallowed and Stella could see her eyelashes fluttering.

“…a slut,” she finished in a whisper.

Stella’s annoyance shrank up to see the girl so remorseful. “Oh, wait, I’m not trying to judge here. I don’t think that, I really don’t. Only it’s been suggested that, uh, Pitt was the one who hurt you.”

“Pitt?” The tremulous note in Chrissy’s voice gave way to a snort of disbelief. “Pitt ain’t but five foot three on a good day and a hunnert twenty. ‘Sides, he wouldn’t never hurt me. He’s crazy about me. We’d prob’ly still be married if I hadn’t taken up with his boss.”

Read an excerpt from A Bad Day for Sorry and watch the video trailer.

Learn more about the book and author at Sophie Littlefield's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Crack in the Lens"

Steve Hockensmith's novels include Holmes on the Range, On the Wrong Track, and The Black Dove. Holmes on the Range, the first novel featuring Big Red and Old Red, was a finalist for the Edgar, the Anthony, the Shamus and the Dilys Award.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to The Crack in the Lens, and reported the following:

Too bad this isn’t The Page 77 Test. Now there’s a page that’ll curl your literary toes. Oooooo, and page 189’s dynamite, too. And I sure hope pages 207 through 223 make it in front of the Nobel committee, you know what I’m saying? Ditto pages 8, 20, 43 through 47, 71, 73....

I’m pretty proud of the whole book, actually -- said book being, by the way, my newest “Holmes on the Range” mystery, The Crack in the Lens. In pages 1 through 68, we follow Sherlock Holmes-worshipping cowboy brothers Otto “Big Red” and Gustav “Old Red” Amlingmeyer to San Marcos, Texas, where Gustav’s sweetheart, Adeline, was brutally murdered years before. The guys are determined to use their new “deducifying” skills (acquired in the previous three novels) to find the girl’s killer.

Complication #1: Adeline was a prostitute, and her former pimps don’t appreciate wannabe detectives nosing around. Complication #2: The county sheriff, Ike Rucker, is one of the pimps’ best customers. Complication #3: The town marshal, Milford Bales, hates Rucker and the pimps -- but, for mysterious reasons, hates Old Red even more.

On page 65, Sheriff Rucker drops in on the Amlingmeyers’ breakfast to give the boys a little not-so-friendly advice (of the “leave town” variety). He also helps himself to most of their food. Old Red’s a prickly little guy on the best of days, and what we see next is how prickly he can be on his worst. As the conversation reaches its head, Old Red loses his.
_____________________________________

“I knew that gal myself [Rucker is saying as we begin reading], and it’s a shame what happened to her, but you know what she was. It’s a rough business, and people get hurt. That’s just the way of it, and you’d best accept that.”

Old Red’s lips squeezed tight but his jaw was working, almost squirming beneath the skin. He looked like a man trying to figure out what kind of bug just flew into his mouth. He finally washed the sour expression away with a long slurp of coffee.

Rucker’s coffee.

“So,” he said, slamming the mug down hard in front of the sheriff, “you ‘knew’ Adeline, did you? You usin’ that word Biblical-like? Cuz obviously it ain’t just ranch-hands who turn to [the local pimps] for their fun.”

Rucker had been polishing off the last of my potatoes when Old Red got going, and now he froze mid-chew.

“And tell me, Sheriff,” my brother rolled on. “Them ‘people’ who ‘get hurt sometimes.’ Who would you be talkin’ about, exactly? Cuz if the son of a bitch who sliced Adeline up has done the same to anyone else since then, that’s blood on your hands. And another thing -- ”

Gustav was cut off by a nerve-shaking clatter -- Rucker tossing the fork he’d appropriated onto my plate.

“Listen here, you little shit.” Rucker snatched my napkin off my lap, wiped his mouth with it, then threw it back into my chest. “Do you have any idea why I sat down to talk things through with you all polite like this?”

“Because you were hungry?” I ventured.

Rucker kept his unblinking gaze on Gustav.

“Cuz we’re inside city limits,” my brother said.

“That’s right. Milford Bales’s badge trumps mine here in town. But out there?” The sheriff pointed a long finger to the east, then did the same to the north, west and south. “And there and there and there? That’s all me, and the law is what I say it is. Right is what I say it is. And wrong, too. So sittin’ here in San Marcos, I can only try to persuade you to see reason. But the second you cross the line...?”
____________________________________

And it’s on to page 70! On which, as you might guess, the sheriff does not promise to bake our heroes a cake.

I think all this passes the test because it doesn’t just show us a dramatic, high-conflict moment (while weaving in, as luck would have it, some context for the plot). It also ties nicely into the theme of the book. The title, The Crack in the Lens, references a quote from a Holmes story: Dr. Watson writes that the great detective saw love as nothing more than “a crack in one of his own high-power lenses.”

Well, Old Red’s lens is cracking up big-time here, so much so that he’s pissing off dangerous people like Sheriff Ike Rucker. Is he able to hold it together long enough to catch the killer? Readers will have to turn the page to find out...and hopefully, they will.

Read an excerpt from The Crack in the Lens, and visit Big Red's blog to learn more about Steve Hockensmith and his writing.

Author Interviews: Steve Hockensmith.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Floodmarkers"

Nic Brown's fiction has appeared in the Harvard Review, Glimmer Train, Epoch, The South Carolina Review, and Time Out Amsterdam.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to Floodmarkers, his acclaimed first book, and reported the following:

I was recently honored with an invitation to speak at the East Chapel Hill Rotary Club. This filled me with certain level of apprehension, for several reasons. First, I've never been to a Rotary Club before. I'm a 32-year-old former rock drummer. Secondly, my book Floodmarkers contains a certain amount of transgressive behavior. There is foul language. There are naked people. It's contemporary fiction, you know, so this is all par for the course, but when it comes to Rotary, I didn't want to push boundaries. So I read from the story "Steak," the most conservative story in the book. It involves an older woman whose sudden and profound interactions with a lost pit bull allow her to engage with life in a way she hasn't in years. There isn't a foul word in the whole story. And in fact, page 69 might be the safest page in the whole book. It is as follows:

Evelyn was tenderizing a skirt steak on her chopping block. She hit it hard and loud. She’d pulled it from the freezer earlier that morning, when the electricity had first gone out. The refrigerator had begun to thaw, and the steak hadn’t been cheap. She didn’t remember exactly how long it had been there, but it couldn’t just sit out. She might as well have it for lunch.

The phone was still working, and Evelyn had it wedged between her shoulder and ear, the spiral yellow cord stretching taut across the room.

“He could have died,” she was saying. “He’s still in the hospital, you know. He still might.”

Ruthie Lingle was on the other end. She was a friend from Forbis and Dick Funeral Home. She worked there, in the business office. Evelyn knew her only from going there so often.

“This is going to sound silly,” Ruthie said. “But are you sure it was a seizure?”

“That’s what the, um.”

“EMT?”

“Yes. What the EMT said.”

“And you found him. Can you believe? Of all people.”

“I don’t think of myself as a hero, really,” Evelyn said. She thudded the mallet into the meat and a piece of something shot up, into her left eye. She squeezed her eyes shut and set the mallet down, then just stood there with her eyes closed and her head thrown back.

“Did you really just say that?” Ruthie said.

“What? Yes. He’s still in the hospital, you know. Hasn’t been home yet. What a day.”

“Don’t think of yourself as a hero. I cannot believe you said that. What—”

It's my book, it's my writing, and this is a good page and, in fact, it was a great page for Rotary (who, incidentally, were wonderful to me and very engaging – not at all as stuffy as I had expected), but I wouldn't say it is representative of Floodmarkers because of the following reason: I felt very comfortable reading this page to Rotary. However, I would not feel very comfortable reading the whole book to Rotary.

Learn more about Floodmarkers and the author at Nic Brown's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Cavalier of the Apocalypse"

Susanne Alleyn was born in Munich, Germany, and grew up in western Massachusetts and New York City, earning a bachelor's of fine arts in theater from New York University's Tisch School of the Arts. She has been researching and writing about the French Revolution since her teens and is currently working on her fourth Aristide Ravel historical mystery.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new novel, The Cavalier of the Apocalypse, and reported the following:

The Cavalier of the Apocalypse is the third novel, but the first chronologically (taking place ten years before the other two), in my Aristide Ravel historical mystery series, set in Paris in the era of the French Revolution. Ravel, a down-on-his-luck writer, has unwillingly been drawn into hunting down the murderer of an unidentified man, who was found dead in a cemetery on a winter morning in 1786.

Page 69 is a low-key interlude, with no hint of the extremely bizarre details (some drawn from history) that crop up earlier and later in the novel. We are eavesdropping on Ravel and his employer/mentor, Inspector Brasseur, during their lunch break on the first day of the murder investigation.

A page or two back, Ravel and Brasseur interviewed a fashionable tailor, Monsieur Yvon, in order to discover how many of his wealthy customers might have owned a certain elegant striped silk waistcoat, an Yvon creation, now unfortunately blood-soaked and quite unwearable. Their next task, as Brasseur warns Ravel, is to learn which of those customers could be the corpse that’s now lying on a stone table in Paris’s morgue—a corpse with throat cut, tongue torn out, and a Masonic symbol slashed into its chest.

It doesn’t take them much longer to discover the dead man’s probable identity and question his family. Just as a very charming young lady volunteers to accompany Ravel to identify the body as that of her missing brother, however, someone gets to the morgue before them and disappears with the corpse. Oops.

Page 69:

It was nearing midday and Brasseur led Aristide to a modest eating-house a few streets to the north, away from the high-priced district surrounding the Palais-Royal, for a dish of pot-au-feu and a glass of rough red wine.

“What now?” Aristide asked, after wolfing down most of his portion of the stew. “I suppose we have to visit all these addresses.”

“Of course,” said Brasseur, crumbling the last of his slab of black bread into his bowl. “Only three of them; that’s nothing.”

“Is this your usual police work, then? Endless rounds of asking the same questions over and over?”

“I fear so,” Brasseur said pleasantly. “Consider yourself lucky; we might be working something tricky like a poisoning, in which case we’d be wearing out our shoes and our voices asking the same very dull questions of every apothecary in Paris, until we found the one who admitted to selling the stuff. But that’s the only way it gets done: patient, methodical investigation. Eventually, with common sense and enough shoe leather, you’ll find the answers you need.”

Aristide looked at the last few swallows of wine in his glass and decided against finishing it; he preferred the alertness that coffee brought, and the wine, in any case, was nearly undrinkable.
Brasseur, oblivious, tossed off the last of his own wine. “Are you done, then? Brace yourself, Ravel. One of these three on Yvon’s list is probably our corpse, and breaking the news to the family is never a pleasant job.”

Read the first chapters of The Cavalier of the Apocalypse, and learn more about the book and author at Susanne Alleyn's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Cavalier of the Apocalypse.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Children of the Waters"

Carleen Brice was named 2008 “Breakout Author of the Year” by The African American Literary Awards Show for her debut novel Orange Mint and Honey, which was also a selection of the Essence Book Club. She is also the author of Walk Tall: Affirmations for People of Color, and Lead Me Home: An African American’s Guide Through the Grief Journey and edited the anthology Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number: Black Women Explore Midlife.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new novel, Children of the Waters, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Children of the Waters is fairly representative of one of the themes of the book, which is the importance of family. This part of the book finds one of the protagonists, Billie, (whom Zenobia calls by her full name Wilhelmina) in a discussion with her mother Zenobia about Billie's significant other.

Since the book has two protagonists, Billie and her half-sister Trish, a page from a chapter that only features one of them is only partially representative. And the way the book is structured, each chapter alternates between Billie's and Trish's points of view, so Page 69 doesn't tell us much about Trish, but I think it's still fairly representative of the book. It's certainly representative of my writing style.

Zenobia proved that right away. "Wilhelmina, my love, what is going on?" she asked as soon as the spinach lasagna was served and the blessing given.

"I told you Nick had a gig tonight," Billie said to her plate, though she knew her mother hadn't believed her the first time she said it.

Why did she even try? She was a pitiful liar, and lying to her mother never got you anywhere anyway. Ask the city manager who was forced to resign after Zenobia discovered he was turning in fake time sheets for temporary employees who did no work and splitting the paychecks with them. The poor fool was lying right into the camera when she pulled out a time sheet he had signed for a worker who happened to have spent that week in jail on domestic violence charges, and, therefore, couldn't have worked. To add insult to injury? Zenobia and her cameraman had cornered him in a strip club parking lot during the workday.

Of course that was back in the day when Zenobia was on the evening news. Nowadays, she didn't do any investigative reporting.

If Zenobia was less refined, she would have sucked her teeth to show her disapproval, but instead she made a tiny ladylike noise in her throat. "I'm going to let that one go because you know I'm talking about more than this evening."

Read an excerpt from Children of the Waters, and learn more about the author and her work at Carleen Brice's website and her blogs, White Readers Meet Black Authors and The Pajama Gardener.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Dark Horse"

Craig Johnson's Walt Longmire mysteries include The Cold Dish, Death Without Company, Kindness Goes Unpunished and Another Man’s Moccasins.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to the latest book in the series, The Dark Horse, and reported the following:

I think that page 69 is relatively representative of The Dark Horse, and a reader would be inclined to read on. The novel is something of a quintessential western and mystery in one with someone turning up dead in a small town (I think it’s about page six where Walt makes the observation that he should’ve taken into account the inherent difficulties of going undercover in a town of forty) and a stranger arrives and starts asking inconvenient questions. The Dark Horse is a novel about community, and what happens when community fails but it’s also a novel that concerns itself with the mythos of the American West and whether the dream is meant to be for all of us.

The scene on page 69 is actually one of my favorites in the novel; the scene where my sheriff protagonist is undercover in a motel room in a small town on the Powder River of northern Wyoming. The young woman he’s having a conversation with is a Guatemalan bartender from the adjacent bar who rented Walt the room at a discount price, since the toilet doesn’t work. He returns to the room that night to find someone in his bathroom, which turns out to be the illegal alien with an associate’s degree in criminal justice from a local community college, and proves to be more than a match for the sheriff.

I swallowed again, feeling the aspirins finally hit bottom. “Do I make you nervous?”

“No, but I don’t think you’re an insurance man.”

“What do you think I am?”

“A cop.”

I nodded. “How do you figure?”

She put the bottle of asprin on the bed and reached out to take my hat from my knee” When you’re a fugitive, you get a feeling for these things.” She examined the inside of the black fur felt: “7 3/4-Long oval. Ten X, H-Bar Hats, Billings.” The mahogany eyes, young, but deep stained with experience, looked back up at me. “If you’re federal, and I’m hoping you’re not, you flew into Montana and bought a hat so you could blend in—or you’re from the FBI field office in Billings or Cheyenne.”

I stared at her, the pain in my head resurging. “What, you taking a mail-order course in how to become a private investigator?”

“Almost two years of law enforcement classes at Sheridan College.” Both shoulders shrugged this time. “Ran out of money.” I sat there without saying anything. “You could be state, maybe an investigator from DCI, but they were already here.”

I nodded again. “You have a very active imagination.”

“Or you could be local, but I doubt it—the sheriffs around here couldn’t find their butts with GPS.”

As Sheriff Walt Longmire notes two pages later, “In town for eight hours, and already made by an associate degree.”

Read an excerpt from The Dark Horse, and learn more about the author and his work at Craig Johnson's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Of Bees and Mist"

Erick Setiawan was born in 1975 in Jakarta, Indonesia, to Chinese parents and moved to the United States when he was sixteen. He is a graduate of Stanford University and currently lives in San Francisco.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to Of Bees and Mist, his first novel, and reported the following:

I would say that page 69 is representative of the rest of the book in that it highlights the tumultuous relationship between the heroine, Meridia, and her father, Gabriel. Meridia grows up lonely and neglected, and for reasons that will remain a mystery until many years later, her father often behaves cruelly and spitefully toward her. When Meridia turns sixteen, she meets and falls in love with Daniel, the son of a jeweler. Page 69 opens with a matchmaker asking for Meridia’s hand on behalf of Daniel’s parents, but Gabriel quickly tosses him out of the house without ceremony. His reply to the matchmaker’s request? “Watch where you blow hot air. Next time, I won’t be so gentle.” This scene reveals both Gabriel’s short and violent temper, and also the powerful dominion he holds over Meridia. It’s telling that he doesn’t consult her before turning down the proposal, doesn’t think she’s mature enough to make her own decision. On subsequent pages, you’ll find Meridia battling her father for the sake of her happiness.

Page 69 also offers a glimpse of the multicultural setting of the book. I am a product of three different cultures: born in Indonesia to Chinese parents, and moved to America when I was sixteen. The book, consequently, is woven from these various cultural threads. In the fantastical town where Meridia lives, you’ll find Chinese traditions, Indonesian superstitions, and American ideology coexisting side by side. My description of the matchmaker on page 69 is my take on an old-fashioned Chinese matchmaker: “a red silk robe with wide sleeves, a golden sash across his chest, and a conical black hat that made him look like a messenger from the afterlife.” I’ll leave it to you to tease out the book’s other cultural influences.

Read an excerpt from Of Bees and Mist, and learn more about the book and Erick Setiawan at the official Of Bees and Mist website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Starvation Lake"

Bryan Gruley is the Chicago bureau chief of the Wall Street Journal. An award winning journalist, Gruley shared in the Pulitzer Prize given to the Wall Street Journal in 2002 for coverage of the September 11 terrorist attacks. He also wrote the prize-winning non-fiction book, Paper Losses: A Modern Epic of Greed and Betrayal at America’s Two Largest Newspaper Companies.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to Starvation Lake, his debut novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Starvation Lake straddles two scenes. One is a flashback in which the protagonist, Gus Carpenter, describes a superstition peculiar to his old hockey coach, Jack Blackburn. The next scene, set in the present of the novel, involves a conversation between Gus and his young reporter, Joanie McCarthy, about the real story behind Blackburn’s death.

When I first read the page for this exercise, I thought, “This isn’t representative of the book at all.” But I wasn’t paying attention.

The Blackburn scene reveals a glimmer of the coach’s personality, the way he manipulated the boys who skated for the Hungry River Rats. While seemingly harmless in the context of this single paragraph, it’s a subtle foreshadowing of darker revelations to come.

The scene between Gus and Joanie encapsulates the central mystery of the book—what happened to Blackburn?—while hinting at the tension boiling within Gus over how hard to pursue the answer to that question. It also alludes to the town’s reluctance to confront unpleasant reality when Joanie tells Gus of the “fat guy at the diner” who proposes the ludicrous theory that hockey coaches from Detroit had Blackburn killed.

I think I missed the relevance on first read because the world I portray in Starvation Lake becomes clear only in brush strokes, one small one after another. Or at least that’s how I tried to paint it, so that the whole picture wouldn’t become clear until the end, or at least near the end.

Read an excerpt from Starvation Lake, and learn more about the book and author at Bryan Gruley's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue