"Our Lady of Immaculate Deception"

Nancy Martin is the author of nearly 50 pop fiction novels including the Blackbird Sisters Mystery Series. She serves on the board of Sisters in Crime and received the 2009 Romantic Times magazine Lifetime Achievement award for mystery writing. Her new mystery series debuts with Our Lady of Immaculate Deception, which has received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Library Journal. One blurb calls the book “a good time in a bad neighborhood.”

Martin applied the Page 69 Test to Our Lady of Immaculate Deception and reported the following:

How clever of you to choose Page 69. It comes after the set-up of every good story, doesn’t it? And starts the reader into a section of the book that’s less about plot, more about theme. Page 69 of Our Lady of Immaculate Deception is the first lull in the action of this mystery-thriller hybrid, as Roxy Abruzzo goes for a morning run with her old high school friend (and former track star) who’s now a physician, Adasha Washington, one of the few characters who knows what’s truly in Roxy’s heart. This passage isn’t particularly witty, but it shows my preference for using dialogue instead of long chunks of narrative to tell the story. It also demonstrates that Roxy isn’t everything the reader has seen before—the bad girl with a big mouth and a pitbull to back her up. I wanted Roxy to be a new kind of mystery protagonist. Page 69 shows a different layer to her character.

Page 69:

Roxy only hoped she could keep up for the first couple of miles. After that, there was no use trying. But Roxy met her old friend several times a week, and it wasn’t just the exercise that was good for them.

When they reached the river, running smoothly in the same rhythm, and started on the path upstream toward the old Heinz food plant, Adasha said, “I had a patient last night who could use your special brand of TLC.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“A girl whose live-in boyfriend beats her up. She needs a fresh start. A place to live for a while, maybe some help getting a new job.”

“Why didn’t you call Social Services? Sounds like a case right up their alley.”

“Her boyfriend’s another doc. He could snoop the records and find out her whereabouts. I think he’s liable to go after her again. The present situation is toxic, and normal channels just don’t cut it. So I thought maybe you could find her an apartment—a place she could hide until she gets her shit together.”

“How much time to I have?”

“Five days is my best guess. Plenty of time, right? She’ll be in ICU for two, on a step-down floor for three or four days after that. Maybe longer if we find previous injuries that require care.”

“Jesus. What did he beat her with?”

“A crockpot to the head, then a meat tenderizer to the bones of her face.”

Roxy quelled the emotion that roiled inside herself. It was the kind of story she should be used to by now. “He in jail?”

“Hell, no, he’s some kind of hero in orthopedics. Rescues professional athletes from career-ending injuries. We wouldn’t want a Superman like that to spoil his reputation now, would we? His girlfriend, on the other hand, is expendable as far as the bosses can see.”

“I think I know a place she could crash for a while. And one of the neighbors is a nurse. Meanwhile, somebody needs to end his career.”

“I’m working on it,” Adasha said, and she sprinted ahead to a foot bridge on the path.

Read an excerpt from Our Lady of Immaculate Deception, and visit Nancy Martin's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Walking to Gatlinburg"

Howard Frank Mosher is the author of ten novels and a travel memoir. His novel A Stranger in the Kingdom won the New England Book Award for Fiction and was made into a movie, as were his novels Disappearance and Where the Rivers Flow North. He is a recipient of the Literature Award from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.

Mosher applied the Page 69 Test to his new book, Walking to Gatlinburg, and reported the following:

On page 69 of my new Civil War novel, Walking to Gatlinburg, 17-year-old Morgan Kinneson, who is doing just that – walking from northern Vermont to the Great Smokies, in search of his older brother who is missing in action in the war – arrives at the Erie Canal. Here he encounters his cousin, Dolton (Dolt) Kinneson:

Dolt caught Morgan up in a crushing bear hug. Then he explained that the Great Western Canal was as far south as he’d gotten on his quest to enlist. Some months ago he’d taken a job with a showboat, whose principal attraction was the gigantic head and jaws of a sperm whale, in which twenty ladies and gentlemen could sit as proud as Jonah and have their daguerreotype made. On the deck several black crewmen were watching the reunion between the cousins.

Yes, indeed, p. 69 of Walking to Gatlinburg is representative of the rest of the novel. Like my other nine novels, this book abounds with unusual characters and high-action events. Morgan himself happens to have acquired an elephant, which winds up pulling Dolton’s whale barge as it’s being chased by another barge commandeered by a psychopathic killer. In its absurdity and weirdness, p. 69 reflects the chaos and senselessness of the war and violence in general, one of the main themes of the book.

Read an excerpt from Walking to Gatlinburg.

Howard Frank Mosher is promoting Walking to Gatlinburg on a 100-city book tour titled “Transforming History into Fiction: the Story of a Born Liar.” Check the itinerary on his website and follow updates on his blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Xombies: Apocalypticon"

When not writing satirical horror novels, Walter Greatshell dabbles in freelance illustration (with an eye to creating dark children’s books, comics or graphic novels), humorous nonfiction (a throwback to his early days as a freelance journalist and arts critic), and stage acting (including in local productions of Oedipus Rex and Karel Capek’s R.U.R.). He has been a graveyard-shift nuclear-submarine technician and the general manager of a Providence landmark, the Avon Cinema.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new book, Xombies: Apocalypticon, and reported the following:

Page 69 of my novel Xombies: Apocalypticon is quite a fortuitous page choice, as it's where the action really begins. It's the first page of Chapter Eight, "Field Trip," where two groups of teenage refugees are leaving the relative safety of the nuclear sub to scavenge for food and supplies ashore. Their leader is 17-year-old Sal DeLuca, a former BMX champ, who is despised by the other boys because of his collaboration with the hated Navy crewmen. We get Sal's flashback to the last meal he ever shared with his father: the submarine factory's final picnic for its soon-to-be shafted employees. So there's a lot happening on that page, and a lot about to happen, which I hope gives the reader a good incentive to keep reading. The Sal DeLuca story is a major part of the plot, so I would say this is fairly representative of the book as a whole ... though there is little hint of the insanity to come.

Learn more about the book and author at Walter Greatshell's website and blog.

My Book, The Movie: Xombies: Apocalypse Blues.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Drink the Tea"

Thomas Kaufman is an award-winning motion picture director and cameraman. He has twice won the Gordon Parks Award for Cinematography, and an Emmy for his documentary about deaf children, See What I'm Saying.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his first novel, Drink the Tea, a winner of the PWA Best First Private Eye Novel Competition, and reported the following:

Drink the Tea follows Washington, DC private eye Willis Gidney, as he searches for a woman who's been missing for twenty-five years. Not an easy job. And not having the woman's name or birthday makes the job that much harder.

The only reason Gidney agrees to take the case is that the missing girl's father is Gidney's best friend, jazz saxophonist Steps Jackson. He thinks that someone with Gidney's "particular background" would want to help.

Gidney grew up without parents or a home. He has few linear memories of his childhood. His own identity is a mystery. So Steps is right -- it does appeal to Gidney to reunite a father and daughter.

To help the reader understand Gidney, I write about his childhood. Throughout the book I switch scenes between the present, with the adult Gidney investigating, and the past, where a much younger Gidney learns to be a con man and a rip-off artist.

During a scam gone bad, Gidney is taken into custody by the DC police. Then he's swallowed by the juvenile justice system. Leading up to page 69, we find the young Gidney living at a place called Junior Village, a prison for children. The chief crook is a kid named Eddie Vermeer. Gidney's about to meet him.

Page 69 gives a snapshot of life in Junior Village. The young Gidney is profiting from dealing in contraband. It's night, and he's and is toddling back to his barracks with an armload of comics. From the darkness roars the Keg, an enormous kid who's targeted the younger, smaller Gidney. Keg drives a fist into his gut and him and sends him flat on his back:

"When the Keg rushed me I drove my foot into his crotch, grabbed his shirt, and flipped him over me into the wall of our barracks. His back made a pleasing thwack as he hit the wall and slid to the ground.

"Not a bad move, kid."

Now I panicked, thinking there were two of them. I scrambled to my feet, fists out, and the same voice laughed. "Take it easy, kid. I'm on your side."

I could taste blood on my mouth and wiped my hand across it. My jaw throbbed. It would hurt for a week. I looked at the Keg, who was lying on his side in the dirt. "You could have helped," I said to the newcomer.

"You didn't need it."

I turned to get a look at him. It was dark, but I could make out a good-looking kid with an easy-going smile. He put a hand on my shoulder. "Come on, I'll buy you a beer."

#

I've heard that a good con man either has an open, honest face that people just naturally trust, or be the kind of guy you'd want as your friend. Eddie Vermeer was that rare phenomenon, a person with both qualities. I was sitting in his private room on a bed that actually had clean sheets and a box spring under the mattress. He handed me a can of Bud.

"How old are you, kid?"

I shrugged, looking around his room. I couldn't keep the wonder out of my voice. "How'd you land the cool digs?"

He glanced around as if noticing for the first time the difference between his private room and the communal hell the rest of us lived in. "Clean living."

I'd been swigging beer and laughed and beer went up my nose. I thought that was funny too and fell over laughing.

I like this page. I work as a cinematographer and shoot a lot of TV shows, sometimes shows about cops. This helps my writing a lot. I try to write visually, seeing the scenes in my mind's eye.

So, looking at 69, I see two separate scenes -- a nice little action sequence, and a new character stepping into frame. And a bit of humor. I tried to make Tea an entertaining and fun read, though it does have its dark elements. It's the kind of book I like to read. Gidney is tough and resourceful, even as a kid. And this section gives the reader an understanding of what kind of man Gidney might grow up to be, except for --

Shadrack Davies, DC police captain, who takes in Gidney as a foster child. But I can't tell you about that – it happens after page 69.

View the trailer for Drink the Tea, and learn more about the book and author at Thomas Kaufman's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Werewolf Smackdown"

Mario Acevedo is the bestselling author of The Nymphos of Rocky Flats, X-Rated Bloodsuckers, The Undead Kama Sutra, and Jailbait Zombie.

He applied the Page 69 Test to Werewolf Smackdown, the fifth volume in his satirical supernatural series, and reported the following:

Vampire-detective Felix Gomez goes to Charleston, SC for an assignment that traps him between rival clans of werewolves. Like all vampires, Felix had stayed clear of lycanthropes, because clashes between them could inflame a war that would threaten the supernatural world. Felix learns that the ferocious, double-crossing werewolves of Charleston have done very well for themselves.

Page 69 excerpt:

The terrace was made of hexagonal slabs of terracotta flagstone bordered with concrete planters and benches. The terrace looked over a garden that sloped to a lawn the size of a football field. An S-76 helicopter, sleek as a torpedo, sat on a concrete pad in the center of the lawn. A man in a blue flight suit stood beside the open cargo door of the helicopter.

A path of square paving stones snaked from a porch on my left at the opposite side of the house. The stones led to the helicopter pad and continued through a line of magnolia and cypress trees that separated the lawn from a flat muddy beach. The path ended at a long, narrow pier extending from the beach into Charleston harbor. Speedboats and a yacht, a sixty-footer I guessed, were moored to the pier.

Something bothered me.

Everything seemed new. Not brand new but the mansion and grounds looked recent, unlike similar buildings in Charleston that dated back centuries.

Along the northern boundary, a wall of dense shrubs and trees masked the view of the neighbors and in turn, kept them from looking in. I got the impression that Calhoun and his patroness, the late Inga Latrall, despite her promise at keeping the Lowcountry pristine, didn’t hesitate at bulldozing the locals out of the way and carving out a place for this mansion.

What the werewolves wanted, they took.

Read an excerpt from Werewolf Smackdown, and learn more about the author and his work at Mario Acevedo's website and blog. Watch the video trailer for Werewolf Smackdown.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Gone 'til November"

Wallace Stroby is an award-winning journalist and a former editor at the Newark Star-Ledger. He is the author of the acclaimed novels The Heartbreak Lounge and the Barry Award-finalist The Barbed-Wire Kiss.

He applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, Gone 'til November, and reported the following:

Page 69 of Gone 'til November finds Sara Cross, a single mom and the only female deputy in a rural Florida sheriff’s department, having a troubling conversation with her boss, Sheriff Hammond, in his office. A few nights earlier, Sara had witnessed a shooting incident in which a fellow deputy killed a young black man during what should have been a routine motor vehicle stop. Complicating things is that the deputy, Billy Flynn, is also Sara’s ex-lover. As more details emerge about the shooting, Sara finds herself torn between love and duty, loyalty and the truth.

Hammond, a Vietnam vet, is cautioning her to steer clear of Flynn while the investigation proceeds. Some hard decisions may need to be made along the way, he warns, and he doesn’t want her getting caught up in whatever happens next. She – and her career – could both wind up as collateral damage.

He’s right, of course, more than he knows. But it’s also too late. Soon, an aging – but still deadly – enforcer for a New Jersey drug gang shows up with his own questions about the shooting – and the now-missing duffel bag of cash that was in the trunk.

But the heart of the conversation comes on page 70, when Hammond recalls his time with the “Rough Riders,” trucking supplies in to the besieged Marine base at Khe Sanh, along Vietnam’s treacherous Highway Nine. Through late 1967 and early 1968, Khe Sanh was under constant attack, while six thousand Marines successfully held off a vastly superior enemy force.

Hard choices were the order of the day then as well, Hammond says:

“They’d have one of us in a tanker truck, driving five thousand gallons of JP-4, sandbags on the floor, an M-16 and that’s it. One man. I made that run about a dozen times. Saying every prayer I knew along the way.”

“Maybe it helped.”

“Maybe it did. But what I didn’t find out until later was the philosophy behind it, the way it operated. Our guys were getting blown up all the time, mines, snipers, RPGs. There was no way to hold and control the jungle around the road. The logistics officers figured we were losing an average of three to five percent of everything that tried to get through. No matter what they did. Three to five percent of the supplies lost, three to five percent of the men killed.”

“That must have been tough.”

“You know what solution they came up with?”

She shook her head.

“Add five percent more men, supplies, trucks. Make your losses sustainable. Get more trucks, more men out on that road so you can lose five percent without impacting the efficiency of the base. And it made sense, unless you were one of those guys that didn’t get through, or their families.”

“Doesn’t seem fair.”

“Fair or not, it worked. And you know what that’s called?”

“What?”

“Management. Take it easy out there, Sara. Be safe.”

Read an excerpt from Gone 'til November, and learn more about the author and his novels at the official Wallace Stroby website and The Heartbreak Blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Adamantine Palace"

Stephen Deas is the author of the acclaimed short story “The Snow Fox.”

He applied the Page 69 Test to The Adamantine Palace (Volume I of The Memory of Flames Trilogy), his first novel, and reported the following:

The cool thing about having several editions around is that I get to pick and choose which page-69 I quote, right? Because the German translation has some really cool dragon action going on.

I don't get to choose? Aw. OK, then here's most of page 69 from the US edition:

‘Have a care, Your Highnesses. The edge is treacherous. It's a long way down, and many people have fallen over the years. The sea pulls them down, somehow.’ He stopped a couple of feet from the edge and offered Princess Lystra his hand. ‘The sea, Your Highness. The endless Sea of Storms.’

Lystra took his hand, and so he gave it a gentle squeeze and hoped that Queen Shezira wouldn’t notice.

‘It’s… breathtaking.’ The cliffs dropped a hundred feet to the roaring crashing waves. The sea went on forever, a churning maze of white-capped waves stretched as far as the eye could see, fading into the grey haze of the far horizon, a mighty monster that could sometimes make even a dragon seem small and tame. Jehal smiled at Lystra. Up here on the edge you could feel the spray and even taste the salt in the air. Lystra was staring, mouth agape. ‘It goes on and on and doesn’t stop! Like the Sea of Sand, except made of water!’

Jehal gave her an indulgent smile. ‘The Taiytakei say that if you sail far enough, and can navigate the storms, there are other lands across the waters, so distant that you would have to cross from one end of the realms to the other to even begin to understand how far away they are.’ Mentally he congratulated himself. There. That didn't sound patronising at all.

‘All that water…’ Lystra took a step closer to the edge. Jehal tightened his grip on her hand and she stopped. The cliffs plunged vertically down into the sea.

‘There is a path, from the back of Clifftop, that runs down to the sea,’ he said. ‘The steps are worn and slippery and the way is treacherous, but there is a cave there that can only be reached by those steps. To truly see the waves crash on the rocks and send their plumes of spray up into the air, there is no better place than that cave. I will take you there one day.’

Jaslyn suddenly walked right up to the edge and looked down. For a moment it seemed to Jehal that she swayed in the wind that whipped and swirled up the face of the cliff. If she did, though, she quickly caught herself, and the next thing he knew Lystra had slipped her hand out of his and was standing next to her elder sister, laughing.

The Adamantine Palace is a tale of a realm held together by rules and order and a terrible fear of what could be unleashed if those rules are broken. For the realms are also home to dragons. Huge, fire-breathing monsters, the sort that floss with velociraptors, and the only thing that stops them from eating the population wholesale are the drugs they are fed from birth that keep them docile. They have become toys and pets and flying status symbols to the kings and queens who ride them, but their fury has not been forgotten by those who tame them, nor by the dragons themselves, should they ever awaken.

Naturally, one of them does. And all hell breaks loose.

The Adamantine Palace is the first part of a trilogy, which concentrates on the efforts of one Prince Jehal to lie, murder, poison and betray his way to rulership of the Adamantine Palace itself. In this scene, he is meeting his bride-to-be and sorely missing the arrival of a promised wedding present, a perfect white dragon. Over the pages that follow, the white dragon will awake and Jehal will continue on his way. Still, the three characters here are three of the four around which the human story pivots. Jehal, who already has a lover he is propelling towards a throne, will find his bride Lystra to be something more than the mouse he expected, while the bond between her and her dragon-loving, people-hating sister Jaslyn will tip the balance of power one way or the other in books to come.

Of course, in this scene, Jehal knows none of this. For now, little Lystra is simply a mouse-queen to sit veiled behind screens, kept as a baby machine, and her mother and sister a merely complications to be removed in the not-so-distant future.

Read an excerpt from The Adamantine Palace and an essay by Stephen Deas on the "Memory of Flames" trilogy.

Visit the official Stephen Deas website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Hester: The Missing Years of The Scarlet Letter"

Paula Reed is an English teacher at Columbine High School of Littleton, Colorado.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Hester: The Missing Years of The Scarlet Letter, and reported the following:

Page 69:

Jane was a curious combination of the Brigadier General and her mother. She was naturally quiet and reserved, but she had a happy heart. Pearl would not have her dear friend go unnoticed. Of Jane's samplers, she would point out their finest traits, and she spoke enthusiastically of Jane's intelligence and patience. Where Pearl's creativity manifested itself, like mine, through her needle, Jane's blossomed in the kitchen, and because Jane's modesty was genuine, Pearl made it her mission to ensure that every woman present knew just how vital Jane's contributions had been to the extraordinary fare served at Wright House on that particular day. Pearl's loyalty added to her popularity, though more than once I overheard comments about how different the gregarious and agreeable child was from her reticent and disturbing mother.

One October afternoon, with victory in her eyes, Mary waved before me her latest invitation to a state banquet at Whitehall—with my name included upon the summons.

"Mary, I am no one. I am a woman living upon the generosity of you and your husband. I cannot possibly—"

"You are the mother of an heiress of whom several very important families have taken notice. You live in the home of a man who is very important to England and who knows a great many secrets of state. Sooner or later, you knew you must draw some interest. You were supposed to draw interest."

"I think I am going to be ill. All those people, all their fears and judgments…"

"Enough!" Mary scolded. "Where is my old friend? The one who so loved art and beauty? Wait until you see the ceiling of the banquet hall! You'll hardly notice anything else. Where is Hester Lathrop who smiled and laughed and danced with me in the garden of my old home?"

I smiled. "Somehow, I doubt there is dancing at Whitehall Palace these days."

Page 69 captures parallel relationships: one between Hester and her childhood friend Mary, the other between Hester’s ten-year-old Pearl and Mary’s daughter, Jane. It is also the first step in what will become the perilous path Hester must follow.

In Hester, the infamous Hester Prynne of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter has left New England for London in search of a secure future for her daughter. She reconnects with Mary Wright, whose husband is a close associate of Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan lord protector of the Commonwealth of England. Mary sets to work immediately to help Hester make the right social connections for Pearl, so she can make a good match when Pearl comes of age.

In the original novel, Hawthorne tells readers that one of the worst effects of wearing the scarlet letter is that it imparts to Hester the ability to see the sins and hypocrisy in others. Through Mary’s husband, Oliver Cromwell learns of Hester’s insight and realizes that he can exploit it to uncover traitors. Thus, Hester is dragged against her will into a web of political conflict and intrigue.

Pearl and Jane grow up in the midst of these tumultuous times, forever trying to reconcile their girlish dreams of romance with the realities of women’s lives in Cromwell’s England. From their mothers, they learn that often a woman’s most important connection is her dearest friend.

Read an excerpt from Hester, and learn more about the book and author at Paula Reed's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Gin Closet"

Leslie Jamison grew up in Los Angeles. Educated at Harvard College and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has also worked as an innkeeper in California, a schoolteacher in Nicaragua, and an office temp in Manhattan. She is currently a PhD candidate at Yale University, where she is writing a dissertation on poverty and degradation in twentieth-century American writing. She is twenty-six years old.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Gin Closet, her debut novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 finds Tilly, one of the novel’s narrators, embarking on a career as a prostitute in Reno. During this section of the book she flits between seedy motel rooms, cycling through liaisons with failed entrepreneurs and Bible-toting dope smokers. In a sense, the page isn’t entirely representative, because it takes readers to a place and time outside the book’s central narrative. But many of its details evoke some of the novel’s deepest concerns: the way addiction breeds thwarted intimacies and self-sought isolation, and the way that the body is involved in all this unhappiness, marking our despair with foul breath and sudden hungers.

Sitting with her first client in the thick of post-coital disconnection, Tilly finds herself hoping for something, she doesn’t even know what, that might bring some meaning to their encounter:

His mouth tasted dry and sour when we fucked. Afterward he gave me some crumpled bills and pulled a Bible and a box of crackers from his nightstand drawer. I sat on the edge of his bed, legs crossed, and watched him eat. I thought maybe there was something he wanted to read aloud. But all he did was look at me, confused. “You’re done,” he said. “You can go now.”

A few things happen here that work as microcosms for the book as a whole: a traumatic situation (in this case, descending into prostitution via the arms of an addict) dissolves into a collection of sad, quiet details: the carefully-crossed legs, the box of crackers. A woman craves contact but finds rebuff instead, a man retreats into private consolations (drugs, silence, the Bible) in order to leave behind the person who sits right beside him.

Both Tilly and her niece Stella (the novel’s other narrator) find themselves seeking consolation and identity from men—huge, dysfunctional armies of men—and we see hints of that here: how one woman’s career as a prostitute might be echoed by another woman’s cosmopolitan coming-of-age. For both women, lovers function like food or drugs—yet another form of consumption, a desperate grasping at the world.

Page 69 ends with the image of an unhealed wound: It used to be just a regular cut, the man says, another client, but then the blood couldn’t flow there—and this open wound seems like a pretty apt metaphor for the whole book, which is full of psychic scars that won’t stay sutured, no matter how hard the characters try.

Browse inside The Gin Closet, and learn more about the book and author at Leslie Jamison's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Cold Room"

JT Ellison is the bestselling author of the critically acclaimed Taylor Jackson series, including All The Pretty Girls, 14, Judas Kiss and The Cold Room. Her novels have been published in 14 countries, and she was named "Best Mystery/Thriller Writer of 2008" by the Nashville Scene.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Cold Room and reported the following:

I’m always struck by how innocuous page 69 originally seems, and how relevant it actually is to the actual story. Strangely enough, page 69 of The Cold Room fits symbiotically into this pattern. We see Taylor Jackson, newly demoted from lieutenant to homicide detective, getting the shake down from her new boss. In no uncertain terms, she knows that things have dramatically changed for her. It’s her adaptation to these changes that drive the story forward.

He stuck a hand out across the desk.

“Morty Elm. I’m from New Orleans, I worked with the chief down there and was very happy to come onboard when this unfortunate situation warranted your, well, let’s just call it disciplining, shall we?”

Before she had a chance to speak, he continued.

“I’d like to establish a few ground rules. I like to be kept informed of everything my detectives are doing, so you’ll report in regularly. I prefer to read your updates, so if you’d be kind enough to turn in a detailed sheet every evening of your day’s accomplishments, that will make my life grand. I’d also like a full rundown of where you stand with each of your cases, and your plans for solving them.

“I run a tight ship, so I expect you to be at your desk by eight, and to adhere to the dress code. Jeans are not suitable for my detectives. You will sign in and sign out every time you leave the office. In addition, you will find a listing of what is appropriate and what is not on your desk. I spoke with Detective McKenzie this morning, he seems like a fine young man. You have considerably more experience than he, so I trust you’ll be comfortable mentoring the detective, teaching him the ropes.”

“Of course.”

“Then we understand each other. No more surprises at crime scenes, Detective. That’s all I have for you right now. I’ll expect that status report by five. You may go.”

If you know Taylor at all, you know that this doesn’t go over very well. On the next page she resolutely balls up the “appropriateness list” and tosses it in the trash. That’s my girl!

Learn more about the book and author at J.T. Ellison's website and blog.

My Book, The Movie: the Taylor Jackson series.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Print the Legend"

Craig McDonald is the Edgar and Anthony nominated novelist of Head Games, Toros & Torsos, and the newly released Print the Legend. His nonfiction titles include Art in the Blood, a collection of interviews with 20 major crime authors, and Rogue Males: Conversations and Confrontations About the Writing Life.

He applied the Page 69 Test to Print the Legend and reported the following:

My new novel, Print the Legend, explores the death of Ernest Hemingway in July 1961.

It also examines the issue of Hemingway’s posthumous books: Hem’s last wife, Mary, edited and re-titled such works as A Moveable Feast and Islands in the Stream, falsely claiming they were being presented in the form in which her late husband intended.

Print the Legend finds my continuing character, novelist Hector Lassiter, the oldest and best of Hem's friends — “the last man standing of the Lost Generation” — journeying to 1965 Idaho to keynote a Hemingway conference. Hector has heard intimations of some surviving Hemingway manuscripts, including a "lost" chapter of A Moveable Feast and a full-length manuscript written by a deluded Hemingway that Hector fears might compromise or harm his own reputation.

The novel touches frequently on the relation of the artist’s life to his work and the ways in which biography can inform fiction — a concept that Hector Lassiter, an author known as “the man who lives what he writes and writes what he lives,” is all too-familiar with.

Page 69 of Print the Legend actually concludes a document purporting to be that lost chapter of A Moveable Feast centered on Hector. In the “lost chapter,” Hector and Hem are dining together in a Paris café, circa Christmas, 1924.

In the context of Hemingway’s sketch, both men are young writers, still some ways from achieving notoriety for their fiction. Hemingway is married and the father of a young boy; Hector, an only-child, is single and ruing that fact. On page 69, the sketch ends, and Hector is left wondering about its authenticity — a theme that goes to the heart of the novel.

Excerpt of the “lost chapter”:

He pointed to the gift for our son. “I’ve got no brother or sisters, so I’ll never have nieces or nephews, either. I’m afraid Bumby fulfills that need for me. Christ, Hem, please let me have my Christmas. Without it, I’m left to decorating trees in the gardens with fallen women. What kind of Yule is that? You can’t appreciate family, truly, when you have one. When you don’t, it’s all you think about.”

Then, as Hector finishes reading Hem’s sketch, he begins to resent some of the alleged lost chapter’s content:

Hector sighed and bit his lip and sipped more wine. Hem’s sketch of that long-gone Christmas Eve was accurate, and it wasn’t. Much of the distortion—perhaps intended…probably intended—came in the omissions. It was tucked into the spaces between the lines.

As Hector concludes his reading of the sketch, he decides that while Hem probably composed much of the “lost chapter,” another hand or two may have left a mark on the document — a suspicion that continues to fire the novel’s central conflicts.

Read more about Print the Legend, and learn more about the author and his work at Craig McDonald's website, blog, and Crimespace page.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Lullaby"

Claire Seeber is a feature writer for the Guardian, Independent on Sunday, and the Telegraph. She lives in London.

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

Is page 69 representative of the rest of Lullaby? Hmmm…

Page 69 deals with the first morning after young mum Jess’s baby Louis and husband Mickey have vanished at the Tate Modern Museum in London. It is stifling, a boiling summer morning, and Jess is naturally frantic. It’s the first time she admits her feelings of tension towards DI Silver, the policeman in charge of the case. “Last night, I wondered, why didn’t I warm to you?” Their relationship is pivotal to the novel and the incremental ‘will they won’t they’ nature of it starts here…

Also at this point Jess feels Silver’s finger of suspicion might be pointing at her – “anything to get away from Silver’s polite but probing stare”: a recurring theme of Lullaby: no-one is trustworthy, not even your nearest and dearest…

Crucially we see that Jess is alone, a small boat flailing in the sea of activity around her, though never enough activity to convince her enough is being done to find her son. We also see Jess’s ambivalence towards her sister Leigh, most representative of the confusion Jess feels about her own family. “I was puzzled that my sister was flirting with this stranger in my kitchen”…

At the end of page 69, Jess goes to fetch au pair Maxine for Silver to interview and finds passport photos of the baby hidden in the girl’s empty room…so the page ends on a cliff-hanger, quite typical of the book: lots of new hope and false dawns to keep the reader guessing up to the last minute…

Crucially, dear reader, I really hope that page 69 would want to make you read on!…

Learn more about the book and author at Claire Seeber's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue