"Murder in Mykonos"

Jeffrey Siger was a New York lawyer -- litigating high-stakes society scandals and other delicate public and private matters of domestic and international consequence -- until giving it all up to write full-time among the people, life, and politics of his beloved Mykonos, and spearfish in its Aegean waters.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Murder in Mykonos, and reported the following:

On tour for Murder in Mykonos, a #1 best selling English-language book in Greece, a best-seller in many US markets, and picked by several reviewers as among the best books of 2009, I at times adhered to the classic Ford Madox Ford adage, “Open any book [in this case mine] to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole work will be revealed to you.” Now, thanks to “The Page 69 Test,” I have an option.

Murder in Mykonos is the debut novel in my Chief Inspector Andreas Kaldis series from Poisoned Pen Press, and page 69 captures a sense of the 24/7 party ambiance one can expect to find on that legendary Greek island paradise—and a bit of the edge to suggest why when a young woman tourist disappears from the face of the earth no one notices. That is, until a body turns up on a pile of bones under the floor of a remote mountain church, and the island’s new police chief—the young, politically incorrect, former Athens homicide detective Andreas Kaldis—starts finding bodies, bones, and suspects almost everywhere he looks. Killings aren’t supposed to happen in tourist paradise. It’s Greece’s most unimaginable nightmare—one no politician wants to confront.

Just when it seems things can’t get any worse, another young woman disappears and political niceties no longer matter. With the investigation now a rescue operation, Andreas finds himself plunging into ancient myths and forgotten island places toward a shattering conclusion in a race against a killer with a missionary-like zeal to carry out his plan for her murder.

But wait, there’s more. The sequel, Assassins of Athens, just was released and in a starred review from Booklist is described as “international police procedural writing at its best.” When I apply my now most-favored Page 69 Test to Assassins of Athens, all I can say is, “BINGO!”

Page 69:

CHAPTER SIX

The man at the end of the bar extended his hand, “My name is Panos and welcome to Panos’ Place—the best place in all of Mykonos for making friends.” A small crowd of middle-aged men around him parted as she moved toward the empty stool to his left.

“Thank you.” She was about to add “sir” but caught herself. She sensed he’d be insulted if a young woman treated him with the respect due an elder.

“Would you like something to drink?” He waved to a very hot-looking young Greek behind the bar. He was about her age, tall with dark hair, dark eyes, a dark, well-toned body—she pulled her eyes off him. No need to inflame her need any further, especially since she was about to start drinking.

“As …” She caught herself about to say “aspró krasí”—“white wine” in Greek—“my friends back home would say, ‘Wine would be fine’—white please.”

“And where’s home?” Panos’ piercing blue eyes didn’t fit his trusty, hound-dog face. His hair seemed just as confusedly located. Pirate-style, cascading dark brown curls should not share the same head with bushy, salt-and-pepper eyebrows and a drooping, even grayer, walrus mustache. Overall, Annika saw walrus.

“The Netherlands.”

The men around them had been quietly listening but now exploded in Greek.

Learn more about the book and author at Jeffrey Siger's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Veracity"

Laura Bynum was born in Springfield, Illinois in 1968. She graduated magna cum laude from the University of Illinois, and earned an MA in Mass Media and Interpersonal Communications from Eastern Illinois University. In 2006 she attended the Maui Writer’s Conference and was awarded its top prize — the Rupert Hughes Prose Award — for an early draft of Veracity.

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

On page 69, Harper has come back to work after having lost rights to her child. It was part of the plan. She had to prove herself unfit and have her daughter removed to the custody of strangers in order to join the underground resistance without putting the girl in danger. But the cost has proven too high. Harper doesn’t think she can go through with her recruitment, as we see in her discussion with Evans, a mailman who works in the Murdon Building and who’s also a courier for the resistance:

“You’ve had a lot of visitors today,” he says. “I hope you don’t mind one more.”

I unplug my earphones. Turn off my computer. For kind Evans, I lie, “I don’t mind.”

He puts a hand on my shoulder. Wants me to look at him when he talks. “Miss Adams, I’ve come to make sure you’re still planning that trip we talked about earlier this summer. The one to Chesney.”
...
I pat Evans’s hand, still on my shoulder. His skin is loose. It slides over the bones as if not attached. “I’m sorry. I’ve changed my mind about a vacation this year.”

Vacation. Evans smiles sorrowfully at our use of such a term. What we’re discussing is just the opposite. “Oh, Miss Adams.”

I shake my head. “I don’t think I could enjoy it.”

“That’s not always why someone takes a vacation, is it? Some of the best things I’ve done in my life have been done on vacation.”

I grab my purse, my keys that are already out on my desk. “Good night, Evans.” I leave without looking back. “Thank you anyway.”

I drive to the grocery store and go straight to the liquor aisle. It’s become my routine.

On the next page, Harper is picking out her choice of liquid salve when her recruiter appears. While maintaining his anonymity, he escorts Harper out of the store and into the quiet of the back alley where he restores her to her mission with nothing more than a few moments of human touch and understanding.

Aside from being a near-future, dystopian piece about the importance of speech and our part in sorting truth from opinion, Veracity is a love story between a mother and her child. I believe Page 69 is the perfect bird’s eye view of that love.

Browse inside Veracity, and learn more about the book and author at Laura Bynum's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Paganini’s Ghost"

Paul Adam grew up in the north of England and studied law at Nottingham University. He began his writing career as a journalist and has worked in Rome as well as England. He is the author of The Rainaldi Quartet.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Paganini’s Ghost, and reported the following:

Paganini’s Ghost is a murder-mystery set in Italy, featuring Cremona violin maker Gianni Castiglione and his detective friend Antonio Guastafeste. It’s the sequel to The Rainaldi Quartet, the book in which the duo made their first appearance a couple of years ago.

A Parisian art dealer is found murdered in a Cremona hotel room, shortly after a recital in which a dazzling young Russian virtuoso has played Paganini’s legendary Guarneri violin, the Cannon. In the dead man’s wallet is an unidentified scrap of sheet violin music, and in the hotel safe the man has left a mysterious locked gold box.

As Gianni and Antonio investigate the murder, the story taking them to Paris and London, they find themselves following a trail that links back through time to Paganini, his lover Elisa Bonaparte and Catherine the Great of Russia, as they gradually unravel a mystery that has remained unexplained for more than a century.

But you wouldn’t know this from Page 69, which is something of a lull in the storm of activity that precedes, and follows, it. The opening to Chapter Six, the page is a moment of quiet reflection when Gianni takes a break from detection to return to his violin making and muse on his long career as a luthier. It’s something I believe every good thriller needs – a break from the action, which can get very wearing if it’s too relentless, and a chance for the reader to get to know, and understand, the leading characters better.

Read an excerpt from Paganini’s Ghost, and learn more about the author and his work at Paul Adam's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Gutshot Straight"

Lou Berney has written feature screenplays and created TV pilots for, among others, Warner Brothers, Paramount, Focus Features, ABC, and Fox. He is the author of The Road to Bobby Joe and Other Stories, and his short fiction has appeared in publications such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, New England Review, and in the Pushcart Prize anthology. He has taught at the University of Oklahoma; the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and Saint Mary's College in California.

Gutshot Straight, his first novel, was written during the 2007–08 film and TV Writers Guild strike.

Berney applied the Page 69 Test to Gutshot Straight and reported the following:

I love the idea of the Page 69 Test, but – I’ll be honest – I also thought it was pretty much pure hokum. But then I applied to to my novel, Gutshot Straight, and, holy shit! I was actually kind of spooked how well that one page represents my novel as a whole, and the characters in it.

What’s happening on page 69 of Gutshot Straight is that one of the main characters, Gina, is trying to find a buyer in Las Vegas for some valuable postage stamps (at least that’s what she thinks they are at this point in the novel). To do so, though, she’ll have to elude the very bad guys who are after her and the stamps.

She drove back to the Strip. She slipped through the lobby of the Venetian in her cap and sunglasses. Without, she hoped, being spotted. She put down a couple of bills for a room, went upstairs, then came back down to complain about the smell of puke in the room. The room didn’t really smell like puke, but it was such a plausible lie the desk clerk didn’t blink. He switched her information in the computer and gave her a key card for a new room two floors up.

Gina had no intention of using the new room. She hurried back to the old room, where she’d left the door propped open with the brass security claw.

If someone had spotted her, or if the desk clerk ratted, Gina didn’t intend to make it easy for them.

Many of the characters in my novel are very good liars, and they often operate at a high level of craftiness. It – lying, craftiness – is what they’re naturally gifted at, like math. But the characters are human and they don’t ALWAYS operate at a high level of craftiness. What fun would that be, right? So page 69 ends this way:

She raided the minibar for a protein bar and a miniature bottle of vodka. She dragged the yellow pages out from beneath the nightstand and flopped them open on the bed.

She leafed to the “S”s.

Stamps and Coins, Rare – Dealers.

That was easy. Gina finished the vodka and protein bar and realized how sleepy she was. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept, not counting maybe an hour or two in the suffocating trunk of the Town Car that left her more tired than when she started.

She tore the page out of the phone book and decided to take a nap.

Taking a nap is probably not the safest, smartest decision Gina could make right now, given the circumstances (bad guys scouring Vegas for her). But that’s kind of what Gutshot Straight is about – how hard it is to be anything but human.

Read an excerpt from Gutshot Straight, and learn more about the book and author at Lou Berney's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Starfist: Double Jeopardy"

David Sherman is a former U.S. Marine and the author of eight novels about Marines in Vietnam, where he served as an infantryman and as a member of a Combined Action Platoon. He is also the author of the military fantasy series Demontech.

Dan Cragg enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1958 and retired with the rank of sergeant major twenty-two years later. He is the author of Inside the VC and the NVA (with Michael Lee Lanning), Top Sergeant (with William G. Bainbridge), and a Vietnam War novel, The Soldier's Prize. He recently retired from his work as an analyst for the Department of Defense.

Sherman applied the Page 69 Test to their new novel, Starfist: Double Jeopardy, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Double Jeopardy, Starfist book 14, is and is not representative of the book as a whole. It is in that it shows something of how Dan Cragg and I strive for accuracy and verisimilitude. Thirty-fourth FIST, the primary unit in the series, is about to be given orders for a deployment, possibly once more against the toughest opponents they have faced in the past. The characters on this page are third level, never central to the action. Therein, page 69 is not representative. Most of the novel, in this book and the entire series, concerns the Marines of third platoon, Company L, of the infantry battalion of 34th Fleet Initial Strike Team. There is an ongoing backstory, showing the lives (and loves) of the Marines on their home base; most of that backstory in this book comes before page 69. The rest of the novel follows the Marines on the deployment. The Marines find themselves in a three- or four-sided conflict, depending on how one looks at it. Some scenes or entire chapters are shown from the points of view of members of the other sides. Again, verisimilitude--Dan and I like to show that there is a universe beyond the strict confines of one platoon.

Learn more about the book at the publisher's website, and visit David Sherman's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Double Black"

Wendy Clinch is the founder of TheSkiDiva.com, the premier internet community for women skiers.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Double Black: A Ski Diva Mystery, and reported the following:

As you’d expect, Double Black contains a fair amount of skiing. And that’s what you see, when you open to Page 69.

But there’s a lot more to the book than just sliding down the slopes. Double Black features Stacey Curtis, a young woman who ditches her cheating fiance and heads for a Vermont ski town to live the life of a ski bum. Instead, she stumbles upon bitter family warfare, financial intrigue, a hunky ski patroller, and yes, a dead body. More specifically, a dead body in a bed, strangled with the oily chain from a chainsaw.

The victim is David Paxton, son of Andy Paxton, patriarch of the family who owns the local ski area. Andy’s been considering selling the mountain to a large conglomerate who wants to turn it from a small family operation into a real estate venture. And though David was set against the deal, Andy’s other son, Richie, is more than a little interested. Did he kill his brother and if so, was this the motivation? Or did someone else do it for a different reason entirely? Double Black follows Stacey Curtis through a ski slalom’s worth of plot twists as she tries to figure it out.

Page 69 marks the beginning of Chapter 11. Andy is heading out for a little night skiing with Chip Walsh, friend and Spruce Peak ski patroller. Here, he discusses his feelings about selling the mountain and the changes he’s seen over the years. The chapter alternates between Andy’s reflections and Stacey’s frantic search for a ring she may have lost at the crime scene, which could mark her as a suspect in David’s murder.

Page 69:

Andy Paxton and Chip Walsh, on top of the world.

Even in the late evening and under a black sky as clear as glass, there was a steady wind up there. There always was. It bit their cheeks raw as they stood stripping the skins from their skis and folding them into their backpacks. The two of them worked in silence and by moonlight, in a bright open patch of snow near the top of the main lift. Once the skis were ready they took off their headlamps and put on goggles with clear lenses and put on the headlamps again. Thirty yards downhill the Peak Lodge stood empty and dark, just an angular blot against the whiteness of the moonlit snow.

Andy sighed. “I guess the day’s going to come when I won’t be doing this anymore.”

Thirsty from the long climb, Chip took a bottle of water from his pack and drank off half of it. “It’ll be a while, I think.” He supposed that Andy was lamenting his advancing age. “And if I can keep at it even half as long as you have, I’ll think I’ve done all right.”

“I’m talking about trespassing on my own mountain, sonny. One day I’ll be trespassing on somebody else’s.”

Read an excerpt from Double Black, and learn more about the book and author at Wendy Clinch's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Some Girls Are"

Courtney Summers lives and writes in Canada, where she divides most of her time between a camera, a piano and a word processing program.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Some Girls Are, and reported the following:

Some Girls Are is YA novel that contains a pretty brutal look at girl-bullying. This bit of page 69 is a glimpse of (some of) its aftermath. I think it's representative of the tone and style of SGA, but if I'd have anticipated the test, I would've tried to make the passage a little more explosive. :)

I watch him straighten. He looks as bad as me, maybe worse. Unshaven, dirty, disgusting, wrecked.

It’s only been a week.

He glares at me and then he gets close, so close his mouth is inches from mine. I’m afraid he’s going to do something like he did at Josh’s party, and I wonder if anyone would do anything about it if he did, because they all hate me.

“Die,” he says, and then he walks away.

Read an excerpt from Some Girls Are, and learn more about the author and her work at Courtney Summers' website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"True Confections"

Katharine Weber is the author of the novels Triangle, The Little Women, The Music Lesson, and Objects in Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, True Confections, and reported the following:

Page 69 of True Confections is a riff on the narrator’s impossible mother-in-law Frieda and her obsessive cooking habits. Alice’s struggle with Three-Freezer Frieda, as she is known behind her back, begins on the first page of the novel. On page 69, she observes: “Frieda loved to cook and bake and freeze. How many times did she confound my kids by inviting them over with a promise that she was baking her delicious walnut cookies, only to offer them semi-thawed, dried-out walnut cookies from the freezer? These they were expected to enjoy while sitting at the kitchen table breathing in the wafting aroma that lingered from the day’s baking, while racks of soft, warm, fragrant walnut cookies cooled all over the kitchen in preparation for layering in wax paper and entombment in those plastic freezer boxes she cherished.”

While page 69 makes no mention of most of the major elements in the novel -- from the ins and outs of candy production and Alice’s accidental burning of a classmate’s house (which earns her the lifelong nickname “Arson Girl”), to issues of race and religious identity, the problematic nature of a candy inspired by Little Black Sambo, the subtle racism in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Alice’s explanation of the failed Madagascar Plan of the Third Reich -- this page exemplifies the frustration that drives her story. Alice’s narrative is a non-stop sardonic report on the Ziplinsky family from her vantage point as the non-Jew who has married in but has never really achieved insider status. She knows them intimately but she is not really one of them and she never will be.

Learn more about the book and author at Katharine Weber's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Other Lands"

David Anthony Durham is the award-winning author of the novels Gabriel's Story, Walk Through Darkness, Pride of Carthage and Acacia: The War With The Mein, and winner of the 2009 John W. Campbell Award.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his latest novel, Acacia: The Other Lands, and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Other Lands opens with the end of one scene. Mena Akaran has been hunting “foulthings” – the mutated creatures unleashed by the corrupted sorcery the Santoth used at the end of Acacia: The War With The Mein. Each beast is its own particular monstrosity, and Mena has been having quite a time of finding and destroying them.

That’s the backdrop, but as page 69 begins she is wrestling with a different idea. Her lover, Melio, has made it clear he wants set up house with her as soon as all this monster slaying is over. Mena’s not sure what sort of mother she’ll make, or if such domestic bliss will ever be part of her future. Confusion over this lingers with her throughout the book, mostly because life keeps throwing things at her that require her warrior side. Here, she pushes the idea to the side and stays focused on the work at hand…

There was always work to be done. Or so it had felt for months now. Finally, though, it looked as if there might be an end in sight to this war against the foulthings. As far as she knew, there were only two left to face. One in Halaly, one across a large swath of hill region of northwestern Talay. Reports of the latter were scattered and unreliable. The word coming out of Halaly, however, was specific. And dire. It was to that once-powerful interior tribe that she pushed her band once the tenten creature had been vanquished.

The focus then shifts to her first night at the Halaly court of the chieftain Oubadal. Readers of the first book might remember that Aliver had found this man a conniving, hard-nosed power broker in the first book. That was then, though. Now his people are suffering and he needs help…

Oubadal let others tell the tale through a chorus of voices. At first, they said, the thing had been but a rumor. Two years ago fishermen on the western edge of the lake had started telling tales of large aquatic creatures that would appear to eat the fish they already had on their lines, sometimes shredding their kive nets to get the small, silvery fish. There had been many of them, they said, but as they grew larger and easier to spot – their back fins cresting the water when they attacked – their numbers began to drop.

Once they found a carcass washed ashore, a hideous thing longer than a man was tall, like a fish but none that they had seen before…

If you read on to the next page you’d learn that one of the creatures had grown enormous. It was dangerous, yes, but the real problem was that it was sucking the life out of the lake, threatening the Halaly with financial ruin. That’s the kind of mixture of the fantastic with real world possibilities that interests me. Yes, there is a monster, but the monster’s real harm comes from the way it’s upsetting the economic viability of the Halaly nation. It’s the tiny kive fish – and all the trade that comes from it – that creates their power. But with this monster devouring every living thing in the lake they’re on the edge of ruin.

Oh, and one other thing… That mention in the quote up above of one last foulthing in the hill region of Talay is the first mention of a being that’s comes to have a major effect on Mena and on the Known World.

Read an excerpt from The Other Lands, and learn more about the book and author at David Anthony Durham's website and blog.

The Other Lands is one of Amazon's top 10 Science Fiction & Fantasy books for 2009.

The Page 69 Test: Acacia (Acacia, Book 1).

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Disappeared"

M. R. Hall, a screenwriter, producer, and former criminal lawyer, is the author of The Coroner and The Disappeared. Educated at Hereford Cathedral School and Worcester College, Oxford, he lives in the U.K.

He applied the Page 69 Test to The Disappeared and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Disappeared sees my heroine, coroner Jenny Cooper, being approached by two officers from the British Security Services. She’s about to embark on an investigation into the disappearance of two young Muslim students and her visitors give the impression they’d prefer her not to:

Jenny sat back in her chair and tried to see through the fog. She had the feeling this was an attempt to gag and control her from the outset, but the messengers seemed so benign she couldn’t be sure…

Throughout the year I took to write this novel, I wrestled with this aspect of the plot: just how far would or could the Security Services go to suppress a legitimate judicial inquiry into the disappearances of two young men suspected of having terrorist connections? I was worried about making these Establishment forces too sinister to be credible, but I’ve since been vindicated. Last month, November 2009, saw the enactment of a new law which enables our UK government to end or prevent a coroner’s inquest and replace it with a secret inquiry with no reporting of the evidence. This ends an 800 year-old right to a public inquest into a violent or unnatural death.

As a former lawyer I try to write thrillers about real and present injustices. I hope the fact that I deal with current politics and trends give my books an edge. I’m not ashamed of the fact that I’m always for the underdog: experience has taught me that the biggest criminals aren’t hoodlums, but educated men and women who wilfully choose to close their eyes to truth.

On the flipside, the good guys don’t always wear white hats; in fact, often it takes one black heart to recognise another. I explore this theme through the character of Alec McAvoy. Exploring him has confirmed something I always suspected was true: sometimes you have to be bad – I mean, really bad - to be good.

Browse inside The Disappeared, and learn more about the book and author at M.R. Hall's website.

Coinciding with the US publication of The Disappeared, BBC America have released an audio version of the first novel in the series, The Coroner. Click here for a taster.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Americans in Space"

Mary E. Mitchell is author of the novel, Starting Out Sideways, a 2007 Thomas Dunne Book from St. Martin's Press. New York Times best-selling author, Elizabeth Berg, said of this debut novel, "... there is a humanity exhumed in this book that makes you feel proud and hopeful about being a human on planet Earth. These days, that's a rare and wonderful thing."

Mitchell applied the Page 69 Test to her latest novel, Americans in Space, and reported the following:

From Page 69:

“How are you, sweetie?” I ask.

She moved her hand away, stares at her perfect knees. “Okay,” she says, without conviction. Then she looks at me and says, “You want to know what I was thinking about? I was thinking about how I might like to be an anthropologist when I get out of school. But then I was thinking there are probably enough anthropologists in the world already, so why bother?”

“Don’t you think anthropologists are sort of like artists?” I ask.

“What do you mean?” A glimmer of hope lights her dull eyes.

“I mean that every artist or anthropologist interprets the world in their own unique way.”

I watch her legs swing lazily as she thinks about this. “Maybe,” she says.

“So if you decided to become an anthropologist, wouldn’t the world get to see something new, something seen only through Phoenix’s eyes?”

“Through Phoenix’s eyes,” she repeats. “That’s a nice song title.

When I opened my book and read page 69, I thought, Damn! This isn’t what the novel is about at all. For months I have been telling readers that Americans in Space is about loss, and about the long, excruciating road back from loss for a young widow and her unmoored family. The novel’s main character, Kate Cavanaugh, struggles mightily two years after the death of her beloved husband. She cannot reach her angry teenage daughter, who acts out in cyberspace and in tattoo parlors. She cannot get her four year old son to speak in full sentences, or relinquish the ketchup bottle he carries clutched to his heart. She cannot find happiness, despite the best efforts of resourceful friends, an eager love interest or colleagues at work. Her problems are enough to fill 291 pages of a novel, and yet, when I opened to page 69, I found nothing of these problems reflected there at all. Instead I found Kate, a guidance counselor, at her job at the Alan B. Shepard (first American in space!) High School. She is sitting in the school’s courtyard on a cold autumn morning with a very depressed, very beautiful young girl. Phoenix is a member of Kate’s weekly counseling group for mixed-up, troubled students called New Frontiers. My misfits, Kate lovingly calls them.

It is the one area of Kate’s life that seems to work, her weekly efforts with these deeply troubled children. Unlike with her own daughter, Kate feels she can bring comfort and meaning to these young people’s lives. They look up to her and trust her and try not to curse when they’re around her. She has a way of making them believe in themselves, even when they’re feeling most self-loathing or unsure. Phoenix, the girl in the courtyard, especially seems to need Kate’s support. Last year Phoenix swallowed a whole bottle of ibuprofen in a suicide attempt. This year she’s trying out for cheerleading. Kate finds Phoenix sitting in the courtyard, looking somber and confused, just the way Kate feels, the two of them just Americans in space. Maybe page 69 isn’t such a bad representation of this novel after all.

Read an excerpt from Americans in Space, and learn more about the book and author at Mary E. Mitchell's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart"

Jesse Bullington spent the bulk of his formative years in rural Pennsylvania, the Netherlands, and Tallahassee, Florida. He is a folklore enthusiast who holds a bachelor's degree in History and English Literature from Florida State University.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his novel The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart, one of Amazon's top ten Science Fiction & Fantasy books of 2009, and reported the following:

If this had been the Page 59 Test we would be looking at a much more representative passage, containing as it does the titular graverobbing twins who appear in almost every other chapter and an explicit reference to a beard. Even the Page 79 Test would be closer to a representative sampling, because while it is still nearing the end of Nicolette's tale the looming dread that was hinted at on page 69 has arrived in all its monstrous glory. Instead we have page 69, which starts off one of the novel's several side-stories, and these side-stories are expressly written in different styles than the rest of the novel, though they all play back into the main plot and themes of the work.

Said main plot concerns Hegel and Manfried Grossbart, a pair of honest (by their reckoning), pious (by their personal heresy), and utterly ruthless (by all accounts) brothers who set out from their home in plague-ravaged 14th century Germany to raid the tombs of Egypt. Their quest introduces them to as broad a cross-section of the medieval populace as I could feasibly squeeze into the plot, and occasionally certain individuals earned their own stories inside of the greater narrative. Nicolette here, for example.

These side-stories have many functions--recreating the feel of some of the contemporaneous literature that employed a story-within-a-story-format, playing up the fairy tale elements, revealing character motivations, world building, and much more. These side-stories also give the reader an occasional break from the Brothers Grossbart who, while arguably charming in their own twisted way, might overwhelm the reader if they were not given the occasional breather from the twins', ah, strong personalities. Oddly enough, while it is stylistically a bit removed from the main narrative and lacks any mention of the Brothers Grossbart, the chapter that page 69 is extracted from (“A Cautionary Yarn, Spun for Fathers and Daughters Alike”) is one of my favorites of the whole novel.

Page 69:

The sun had rested squarely over her father’s cabin when their sole pig had jerked forward, pulling the tether from her hands and rushing off into the forest. The first hour she spent chiding herself for not minding her charge better, the second for not minding her path better as she attempted to find a familiar marker. Her growing anxiety was given brief respite when she spotted the errant swine across a patch of frozen bog, but after her quarry again escaped into the underbrush Nicolette became distraught. Fear overrode her embarrassment, and she began calling out as dusk slunk through the branches.

When the sun fully departed and the forest came alive with noises she valiantly held in her tears. Her father had told her if she was old enough to wed she was too old to cry, and while no suitors had tramped along the muddy path to their cabin in pursuit of her hand, she maintained caring for a husband could be no more difficult or desirable than tending a pig or a father. Nevertheless, the girl sniffled as she groped her way between the cold bark pillars looming around her.

Then the glow in the distance, and Nicolette ran as fast as she could given the abundance of roots and trunks rearing out of the dark at her calloused feet. Approaching the crooked hut she slowed, relief becoming tinged with her earlier fear of the dark wood. Her father had cautioned her of charcoal burners— their filthy lifestyles, deceptive charms and rapacious hunger for pretty young girls. She paused at the door, uncertainty seizing up her arms and legs, when she felt the sudden and powerful sensation of being watched. She turned slowly, and saw nothing but night in an unfamiliar part of the vast forest.

A twig snapped in the blackness, and Nicolette was crying and banging on the door with both hands. The old woman let her in, slipped the board back into place, and brought the girl to her meager firepit. Minutes later the lass had calmed down, gotten the numbness out of her feet, and took in both surroundings and savior.

Learn more about the book and author at Jesse Bullington's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue