"All That's Bright and Gone"

Raised in the Detroit suburbs, Eliza Nellums now lives with her cat in Washington DC. She is a member of Bethesda Writer's Center as well as the Metro Wriders, a weekly critique group that meets in Dupont Circle.

Nellums applied the Page 69 Test to her debut novel, All That's Bright and Gone, and reported the following:

This is the page where we first meet Mac, an ambiguous character in the rest of the book. My protagonist Aoife (who is a six year old girl) thinks he's pretty fun, but the reader is suspicious because of the reactions of other characters. Is this page characteristic of the rest of the book? Well, it opens a new chapter so I only had a few paragraphs to work with, but we got some childhood nostalgia (the Penguin Palace, a real life ice cream parlor in Maumee, Ohio) and some childish enthusiasm - "The ice cream drips down the front of my dress, but Uncle Donny doesn't even get mad. He teaches me how to suck it out of the bottom of the cone like a straw!" - so I'd say yes. Like most of the book, we have a sense that things are simmering under the surface that our narrator doesn't quite understand, or even necessarily notice. But hopefully that just makes the reader more alert. They have to be, because Aoife and Teddy are pretty focused on the ice cream.

Visit Eliza Nellums's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Small Town"

Thomas Perry is the bestselling author of over twenty novels, including the critically acclaimed Jane Whitefield series, Forty Thieves, and The Butcher’s Boy, which won the Edgar Award. He lives in Southern California.

Perry applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, A Small Town, and reported the following:

I do think that page 69 of A Small Town is representative of the rest of the novel. Leah Hawkins, the highest ranking surviving police officer of the small town of Weldonvillle, Colorado, has taken on a mission. Two years ago the town was destroyed by a break-out at the federal prison outside town. Twelve men planned and directed the break, setting over a thousand violent convicts loose to terrorize and destroy the town. All of the inmates were recaptured except the twelve. All are murderers. Leah takes a leave of absence and goes after them alone. She uses the money from a federal grant intended to rebuild the police department in order to find and kill them.

On page 68 Leah is in Naples, Florida, where she believes her first fugitive, Albert Weiss, will be. She thinks that after two years of freedom he will be nearly out of money, and that to get more he will do what he's always done, kidnap someone for ransom. Because he hasn't got any allies here, he will have to work alone, which means finding the easiest of targets, a child or a rich young woman who has been drinking. On page 69 Leah has found a potential victim, a young woman passed out in her convertible behind a bar. She watches her victim, regretting a little that she's found her because she can't leave her and search other places for Weiss. On the bottom of page 69, she sees a car pull up in the lot and a man get out and walk toward the unconscious victim. She realizes after a moment he is Albert Weiss. This is typical of Leah's actions in the book. She uses her two-year study of the escapees and her twenty years of detective experience to think her way into the presence of each killer.

Learn more about the book and author at Thomas Perry's website and Facebook page.

--Marshal Zeringue

Jacqueline Firkins's "Hearts, Strings, and Other Breakable Things"

Jacqueline Firkins is a writer, costume designer, and lover of beautiful things. She's on the fulltime faculty in the Department of Theatre & Film at the University of British Columbia. When not obsessing about where to put the buttons or the commas, she can be found running by the ocean, eating excessive amounts of gluten, listening to earnest love songs, and pretending her dog understands every word she says.

Firkins applied the Page 69 Test to her new YA rom-com, Hearts, Strings, and Other Breakable Things, a modern retelling of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, and reported the following:

On page 69 in Hearts, Strings, and Other Breakable Things, Edie and Henry are fighting about Henry’s lax attitudes around love and relationships. We get a glimpse of Mansfield, and how Edie doesn’t fit in with her wealthy, polished surroundings. Edie’s repulsed by Henry. Henry’s intrigued by Edie. We sense a growing tension that may shift from hate to something more complex. The page represents several main themes/storylines in the book: the search for confidence when we don’t fit in, the difficulty of finding meaningful love in a disposable, live-in-the-moment society, and a growing awareness that everyone’s more complicated than their first impression might imply. The only thing missing to fully represent the book is a pun.

Visit Jacqueline Firkins's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Jacqueline Firkins & Ffiona.

My Book, The Movie: Hearts, Strings, and Other Breakable Things.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Truth Is"

Raised in the Boogie Down Bronx, NoNieqa Ramos is an educator, literary activist, and writer of “intense” literature. She wrote the young adult novel The Disturbed Girl's Dictionary.

Ramos applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Truth Is, and reported the following:

From page 69:

the peel. So Danny and I think we’re hilarious and set it on the stairs.

“So where were you this morning? Your ears are pierced.” I estimate 120 dollars’ worth of piercings from a homie who may have raided the janitors’ closet. Blanca and I did the research.

“Yeah.” He has wooden plates inserted into his ear holes. “Buddy of mine owed me a favor. Did it for free. But I had to do it this a.m.”

“Free? Except for the cultural appropriation, I like them.”

Danny blinks in surprise.

“So a buddy, huh? You and Blanca. She tried to DIY a tattoo once by reading a prison blog.” Ms. Trial-and-Error was planning on piercing her nose by hand and I was like hell to the no.

“Blanca?”

I said her name. Out LOUD.

“Is she in homeroom?”

Yeah. No. Yeah. “She’s not here.” Not on the stairwell. At the moment. Mostly. “Anyway, tats and piercings were her thing.” Gonna be her thing. “She was into fashion. Costumes, actually. Girl loved petticoats. Other girls walked around in shorties and tank tops. She walked around in the summer with a parasol. She always said she didn’t belong—” to this time.

“What’s your thing?”

“I love the suspenders. And the hats: bowler, Panama, fedoras. I could tie a Windsor knot like nobody’s business. Britches are badass.” Wait. The correct answer was I build sets.

“I can just see the two of you.”

“Actually, you couldn’t. Because Blanca had the cojones to walk through the barrio with a Victorian touring hat. She wore her personality on her sleeve. My personality ... is kind of stitched into a secret pocket.”

On this page we start with a reference to a banana peel being left on the stairs. A recurring private joke that’s shared among the Underdogs--Verdad and her new friends who are LGBTQIA+ and homeless-- is the banana. The banana is also featured in the art work and that’s because my book points it finger at the patriarchy and argues that gender identity should be fun and playful--not painful and assigned by patriarchal power structure.

The convo that follows is between Verdad, my fifteen-year-old protagonist who is recovering from the mass shooting death of her best friend Blanca, dealing with PTSD, and her love interest, transboy Danny. Danny has skipped school yet again, and at this point in the book, Verdad doesn’t know that he’s homeless or that her newly-evolving queer sexual identity may also subject her to the same fate.

Verdad has a big moment with Danny when she speaks Blanca’s name aloud for the first time since the funeral. Danny’s the first person she’s beginning to open up with and trust with her pain. They both have a lot of secrets to uncover before they truly understand each other. Verdad says, While Blanca “wore her personality on her sleeve. My personality … is kind of stitched into a secret pocket.”

Verdad talking about drama and costumes is connected to the whole theme of identity in the book and the idea that teens should be able to safely and joyfully try on different identities as they explore who they really are.

Visit NoNieqa Ramos's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"When the Stars Lead to You"

Ronni Davis grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, where she tried her best to fit in—and failed miserably. After graduating from The Ohio State University with a BA in Psychology, she worked in insurance, taught yoga, and became a cat mom.

Now she lives in Chicago with her husband Adam and her son Aidan. By day she copy edits everything from TV commercials to billboards, and by night she writes contemporary teen novels about brown girls falling in love. When she’s not writing, you can catch her playing the Sims, eating too much candy, or planning her next trip to Disney World.

Davis applied the Page 69 Test to her debut novel, When the Stars Lead to You, and reported the following:

Is page 69 representative of the rest of the book?

On page 69, Devon has her second run in with Ashton after he’s come back into her life after ghosting on her two summers ago. Naturally, she’s in kind of a tailspin, and every time she seems him, the whirl of emotions grow more intense.

Longing and
anger and
desire and—

She’s so angry at him, while also consumed by her memories of their summer together. She’s fighting her desire for him, despite remembering how much hurt her before.

His voice had deepened slightly since that summer. I hated that it still gave me chills.

Devon struggles with her feelings for Ashton throughout the book. She loves him so much, but she’s fights with determining if he is good for her or not. Based on that, I believe page 69 is absolutely representative of the book.

Visit Ronni Davis's website.

My Book, The Movie: When the Stars Lead to You.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Down the Darkest Road"

Kylie Brant is the author of more than forty novels, including Cold Dark Places in the Cady Maddix series, the Circle of Evil Trilogy, and the stand-alone novels Pretty Girls Dancing and Deep as the Dead. A three-time RITA Award nominee, five-time RT Award finalist, and two-time Daphne du Maurier Award winner, Brant is a member of the Romance Writers of America, including its Kiss of Death mystery and suspense chapter; Novelists, Inc.; and the International Thriller Writers. Her books have been published in thirty-four countries and have been translated into eighteen languages.

Brant applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Down the Darkest Road, and reported the following:

From page 69:

“A man named Bruce Forrester was also locked up at that time.” Cady took a picture of Forrester from her pocket and slid it across the table to Gosch. “Do you remember him?”

He tapped the photo once. “Yeah. Yeah, I do. Mostly ’cuz I heard ‘bout what he done later. Killing that kid and all. Knew at the time there was something wrong with him. Did he molest that boy before he killed him?”

Cady blinked. “Why would you ask that?”

Gosch leaned forward, lowering his voice. “There was this other guy in here at the time. Byrd. He was kept isolated. I figured he done something big, but then one of the guys said he was one of them pedos.”

“A pedophile?”

“Yeah. There were just a few of us in there until late the next night when a whole shit ton of people got hauled in. Jailers shifted us around some, but Forrester, he asks to cell with him.” Gosch sat back, gave her a knowing look. “Forrester is one of them guys you give a wide berth. The rest of us waited, expecting a bloodbath. Ain’t no one got time for a pervert like Byrd, and we figured Forrester would half kill him before the jailers could separate them.”

That was the impression Cady had formed of the fugitive as well. “But he didn’t?”

Gosch shook his head slowly. “Nope. Whole time they was in there, they had their heads together whispering. Just talking real low, like the best of buds. Only thing I could figure was Forrester might have the same interest in little kids that Byrd did.”

Page 69 has US Deputy Marshal Cady Maddix tracking down fugitive Bruce Forrester on a recent kidnapping warrant. In this passage, she’s interviewing a county inmate who was jailed at the same time as the fugitive years earlier. Gosch’s conclusion about Forrester doesn’t pan out, but his revelation does connect to how Forrester has been making a living all these years. And it’s critical to Cady’s growing suspicion that the key to finding the man is buried in his dark past.

Five years ago, ten-year-old Dylan Castle and his friend went into the woods one night and stumbled onto Forrester in the middle of a crime scene. Dylan survived; his friend did not. Dylan and his family have moved from place to place to stay one step ahead of Forrester. Cady is afraid that the boy is the reason the fugitive has remained the area. But to find him, she’s first going to have to figure out what happened in the woods that night. The closer she draws to the truth, the more danger she’s in. Cady has to find Forrester before he discovers where Dylan is hiding. And she has to stay alive long enough to save them both.

Visit Kylie Brant's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Revisionaries"

A. R. Moxon is a writer who runs the popular twitter handle @JuliusGoat. He lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Moxon applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Revisionaries, and reported the following:

From page 69:

To him, Bailey was his relation. He didn’t realize that Yale had been her boyfriend. He had no idea his two managers even knew each other before they became colleagues—a misapprehension those two encouraged. No, I doubt Ralph gave Yale a passing thought when he made the hires.

But Donk and Bailey sure gave Yale a passing thought. For them, their new jobs were less a hire than an infiltration. I suppose you could say seeing brother and lover murdered affected them a bit, as regarded their feelings toward Ralph Mayor.

#

It’s nearly dark, and thus far the expected trouble hasn’t arrived. Donk’s closed down the store early, which is a tricky bit of business. You have to come up with a cover story the gangs will believe; Donk decided to claim an internal audit, requiring the manger’s presence. Now they’re by the checkout lanes, pretending to count cash and confabulating. Even so, Bailey frets; there’s always the worry that news of an unauthorized closing will get back to Ralph. They also have to worry about whoever might be on the way.

Donk, being Donk, sees opportunity where Boyd sees only danger. In fact, Donk seems to be ready to shoot some crazy angle, seems to detect some hope that they’ve finally come near the end of their long vengeful road.

The problem with getting Ralph is all the bodyguards. You can’t fight your way into Ralph’s retirement villa. Survival of the fittest? Ralph’s bodyguards are the fittest who survived. Even if you could sneak a weapon past their jealous eyes, you still have Ralph, old, but tough and mean. The odds of prevailing with a shiv against Ralph are not strong, and even then, there would be a bad death afterward. No way to fight past that shrewdness of apes; their paunches hide impenetrable mounds of muscle, they possess a frequently indulged taste for cruel deeds. They know their way around ordnance and cutting edges and brass knuckles, they knew where nerves cluster, they knew where to snip to make your ligaments give way like cables, unroll your muscles inside your skin.

What we need, Daniel is fond of repeating, is an army to go get the bastard. He has the unified gangs, sure, but his tenuous authority over them comes to him from Ralph. No good. He needs another army.

The difficulty in saying whether or not page 69 is representative of the whole is that the whole is comprised of 4 distinct parts, each of which become more fragmentary as the book progresses into revelations I'd rather not mention. However, as page 69, which occurs in Part 1, deals with three of our characters navigating the impact of new intrigues upon long-standing intrigues, it is at least representative of that part.

There is one way at least, however, that page 69 is representative of the whole, and that is that it features a change in mode. We switch from a character named Tennessee, speaking in first person (to an as-yet unrevealed party) about the events that are happening in present-tense Part 1, before swapping over to the events Tennessee is recalling, and a third person omniscient voice. As the book progresses, this shifts will (one hopes) take on greater and greater depths of meaning for the attentive reader. And hey, even if they don’t, they sure will be in there, so I’d say that page 69 is a very … oh let’s say nice … representation of the novel as a whole.

Visit A. R. Moxon's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Revisionaries.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Penmaker's Wife"

Steve Robinson is a London-based crime writer. He was sixteen when his first magazine article was published and he’s been writing ever since. A love for genealogy inspired his first bestselling series, the Jefferson Tayte Genealogical Mysteries, and he is now expanding his writing to historical crime, another area he is passionate about.

Robinson applied the Page 69 Test to his new novel, The Penmaker's Wife, and reported the following:

I think page sixty-nine of The Penmaker’s Wife (my eighth published book to date) is very representative of the rest of the story. I can’t share much of it with you, unfortunately, because it contains some pretty big spoilers. Angelica Chastain is the lead character, and here we see her dark side for the first time, which is something that builds throughout the remainder of the book. On page sixty-nine Angelica is telling her confidante what she did in London before she fled to Birmingham with her young son, William, and about some of the terrible things she’s done since as she set out to make a better life for him. While some dark deeds are revealed on page sixty-nine, however, I wanted the reader to feel some sympathy for Angelica, rather than condemning her for her actions, asking what he or she would have done in her situation, which was very dire indeed. Page sixty-nine is also part of a section that reveals a big twist, of which The Penmaker’s Wife has many.

Here’s how the page ends:

‘You see,’ Angelica said, ‘I’m a monster, and I’m sorry I lied to you before, but how could I have told you all this when we first met? You would not have wished to know me then.’

Visit Steve Robinson's website and Facebook page.

Writers Read: Steve Robinson.

My Book, The Movie: The Penmaker's Wife.

--Marshal Zeringue

"No Man's Land"

Sara Driscoll is the pen name of Jen J. Danna and Ann Vanderlaan, authors of the Abbott and Lowell Forensic Mysteries and the FBI K-9s series.

They applied the Page 69 Test to their latest FBI K-9s novel, No Man's Land, and reported the following:

From page 69:

“If we can match COD on both victims, I’ll be able to make it happen. This may be too soon, though. You know most tox results take four to six weeks to come in,” said Craig.

“Do you think it will be an impediment if we can’t tie together COD?” asked Meg.

“Maybe. Maybe not. There are enough similarities in the unique body dump sites with victims that I can make a case for the potential of a common killer. Let me make some calls.”

Page 69 of No Man's Land finds the FBI’s Human Scent Evidence Team just as they are beginning to realize the case they’re working on may involve serial deaths. It’s representative of the rest of the book in that it’s the gateway for the team taking control of the case.

After unexpectedly finding a body while out enjoying an afternoon of urban exploration—the exploration of abandoned or nearly inaccessible man-made structures, also known as urbex—in Maryland, FBI K-9 handler Meg Jennings and the rest of her team are suspicious of the death, recognizing they’ve found the elderly victim in a challenging location she could not have reached on her own. After looking into past disappearances of older persons, they wonder if they’ve found a victim connected to a much bigger case. But after a second victim goes missing in real time, Meg and her search-and-rescue black Lab, Hawk, and several other team members follow the clues in an attempt to save the victim before it’s too late. The search leads them to the shuttered Pennsylvania industrial facility of Bethlehem Steel, where, sadly, they find another deceased senior.

When Meg presents the situation to her superior, FBI Special Agent-in-charge Craig Beaumont, he takes it upon himself to find a way to not only link the deaths, but to claim jurisdiction of the case due to the murders occurring across state lines. More than that, he will ensure the case becomes his responsibility, allowing his teams to investigate all related disappearances.

It’s clear the victims are alive when they are abandoned in the condemned buildings. Now, if they can put the clues together fast enough, the team might just be able to find the victims in time to save their lives and end this murderer’s gruesome spree.

Learn more about the FBI K-9 Novels.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Lammisters"

An author and arts journalist, Declan Burke has previously published crime novels, including Slaughter’s Hound and the award-winning Absolute Zero Cool. The Lammisters is a comic novel. Although set in Prohibition-era Hollywood, it is influenced by Irish comic novelists such as Laurence Sterne and Flann O’Brien.

Burke applied the Page 69 Test to The Lammisters and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Lammisters is fairly typical of the novel overall, in large part because it is ridiculous to a fault. The Bartley we meet is Bartley McGuffin, who is the personal secretary to one Sir Archibald l’Estrange-B’stard, an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who has journeyed to California in the hope of encountering chorus dolls and movie stars of questionable morals. As we meet him, Bartley has managed to insult Felicia Fortesque, the confidante of Vanessa Hopgood, Hollywood’s most shimmering star; in consequence, Felicia has whipped out her derringer, and is threatening to fatally dispatch Bartley should he utter so much as one single further syllable:

The mind, to paraphrase the immortal Milton, being of its own place, wherein can be devised a hell of heaven, and a heaven of hell, Bartley’s thoughts now wander from his current predicament in a phenomenon that will be familiar to those readers who have found themselves in immediate danger of going the way of a quasi-aristocratic bounder in a Chekhovian third act, i.e., his life flashed before his eyes.

Alas, your humble narrator is obliged to report that said mental two-reeler proved a considerable disappointment to Bartley McGuffin, consisting as it did of a series of sliced drives, duffed niblicks and two-foot putts sent trickling downhill past the hole on the right-hand side. Ironically, the image that jerked Bartley out of his maudlin reverie was that of a ball he had driven straight and true the best part of two hundred and seventy yards down the fairway but which had come to rest nestling in the shadowy recesses of a temporary drain the groundskeeper had neglected to mark GUR. The blend of rage and despair that had accompanied Bartley’s belated understanding that his was a pointless existence lived as a microscopic speck in what was at best a blindly indifferent and at worst mindlessly hostile universe returned now to enflame Bartley’s instinctive fight-or-flight response, and he raised his gaze from the derringer’s pitiless muzzle to meet the equally merciless stare of Felicia Fortesque. And it was now that Bartley McGuffin dug deep, mining a hitherto unsuspected seam of courage, fortitude and grace under pressure, and there found, just when he needed it most, the wherewithal to give vent to a provocatively defiant sniff.

Page 69 combines a number of elements which feature in The Lammisters: most of the characters are devoted to the noble Scottish art, i.e., golf; all of the characters find themselves adrift in a story which has been abandoned by a hapless aspiring author, and are thus living pointless existences in a blindly indifferent universe; and the language employed is exactly what you might expect when a verbose narrator attempts to cobble together a story abandoned by his author, and especially when that narrator seems to know everything that is worth knowing about Western civilisation’s canon of literature – except, that is, how to write a clear, concise sentence.

Learn more about the book and author at Burke's Crime Always Pays blog.

Writers Read: Declan Burke.

My Book, The Movie: The Lammisters.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Mercy Road"

Ann Howard Creel writes historical novels about strong female characters facing seemingly impossible obstacles and having to make life-changing decisions. In her novel The River Widow, a former tarot-card reader turned widow and stepmother must escape the clutches of an evil family while also facing the crime she herself has committed. In The Whiskey Sea, a fierce young woman becomes one of the only female rumrunners on the Atlantic Coast during Prohibition. And in While You Were Mine, a New York City nurse must give up the child she has raised as her own during World War II.

Creel applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Mercy Road, and reported the following:

From page 69 (with a few paragraphs before and after included, so that it makes more sense):

The next day, Cass and I took a taxi to automobile supply houses and procured the necessities and tools for all three ambulances. The doctors had trusted us to stock the vehicles and equip them for anything we might encounter on the roads ahead. After we’d dragged back or arranged deliveries for everything we needed, we took a couple of hours to visit Notre-Dame, the gardens of the Tuileries, and Napoleon’s tomb.

Eve had apparently tired of Kitty and Lottie’s company, or maybe she wanted to see more of France’s sights instead of its shops, because she asked if she could join us. A diminutive blond whose freckles covered her face all the way to her hairline, she could’ve passed for a schoolgirl, although she was twenty-three, like me.

As we walked the boulevards and parks, Eve tended to fall a few steps behind us, and I couldn’t figure out if she liked to lag behind or if she lived for the most part in her own world. She had purchased a small Paris guidebook, and she read as she tagged along.

I could’ve remained on the Pont Neuf for hours looking down at the smooth flow of the river that calmed my nerves about the date coming up that night, but we had much still to see, and we also purchased postcards to send home.

We took a taxi to Montmartre, where Papa had told me the artists congregated, but a waiter informed us that the artists’ turf had moved to the cafés of Montparnasse. Therefore we splurged on another taxi and headed to Café de la Rotonde, which according to Eve, Pablo Picasso frequented. There, Eve finally joined the conversation. “Did you know that when the Tuileries gardens first opened to the public, they barred some people? No beggars, lackeys, and soldiers.”

“Heavens,” I said.

“What are lackeys?” asked Cass.

“I think it’s the service class, such as servants and footmen,” Eve answered.

“Footmen?” Cass asked, then chuckled. “Maybe yesterday’s footmen are today’s drivers.”

I laughed. “Yes, perhaps we wouldn’t have been allowed. But I don’t understand banning soldiers.”

Indeed, the American soldier in France commanded a lot of respect. Whereas the French and British soldiers often appeared war-weary, like haggard ghosts of themselves, the American soldier wore a clean uniform and polished boots and smoked prized American-made cigarettes. He knew he would encounter danger, but he kept everything light with jokes and laughter. Other soldiers looked up to him, girls flirted with him, and children followed him around.

That thought swept me away for a while, the American soldier Captain Brohammer on my mind. I had guessed his age to be about thirty-one or thirty-two; he seemed like a youngster to have already reached the rank of captain. His dashing appearance made me think of Swedish warriors, and I could imagine him in a former life slaying dragons and sea serpents with a shining sword. My hands started trembling, and I put them under the table in my lap. I hadn’t gone on a date since high school.

Cass’s groans brought me back to the moment. Eve pointed at her guidebook and told us that France had always been a war zone. She talked about Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, and Joan of Arc. “This part of the country has been the site of sieges, marches, battlegrounds, and the war camps of France’s enemies going back to the beginning of recorded time.”

Cass looked around the café. “Does anyone have some paper?” she asked the air. “I seem to have wandered into a class on French history, but I forgot paper, and I need to take some notes.”

I held my breath, but Eve, a good sport it turned out, only smiled and continued talking.

Cass held up her hands. “Wait a minute. Are you always like this?” she asked Eve.

“Most of the time,” Eve answered.

Turning to me, Cass said, “If we ever have to ride doubled up, she’s going with you.”

I laughed.

Eve wove her hands together on the tabletop and leaned in. To Cass she said, “If you and I ever have to ride doubled up, I’ll do the driving.”

I liked this girl.

Cass gave a little whoop. “Not on your life.”

“I’ll wager I’m better.”

“Behind the wheel?” Cass shook her head. “What foolish fancy.”

“Speaking of fancies, do you race?”

Cass paled, obviously astonished. “Are you challenging me to a race?”

“Now, girls,” I interrupted them, but the smile wouldn’t leave my face. I hadn’t shared a laugh with friends in a long time.

This scene is typical of the lighter tone of the book before these ambulance drivers reach the war zone, and later, the front lines. I hope you enjoy it.

Visit Ann Howard Creel's website.

The Page 69 Test: The River Widow.

My Book, The Movie: Mercy Road.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Don't Tell the Nazis"

Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch is the acclaimed author of over sixteen picture books and novels. In 2013 she won the Silver Birch Fiction Award for Making Bombs for Hitler and the Red Cedar Award for Last Airlift: A Vietnamese Orphan's Rescue from War.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Don't Tell the Nazis, and reported the following:

From page 69:

I stepped from behind the bush and walked toward the voices.

The Germans who weren’t from Germany: Volksdeutsche refugees. A few were tossing loose soil from a mound onto what looked like a freshly turned garden. Other shovels were neatly piled to the side.

Most of the Germans were calmly sorting through mounds of clothing. Shirts here, jackets there, hats there. As a shirt was picked up and shaken out, then folded, I couldn’t see a bullet hole, and there was no blood. All of the clothing seemed undamaged. But where were the Jewish men?

And then I noticed a familiar face—Frau Schneider, but her daughter, Marga, wasn’t with her. Frau Schneider was picking through the clothing along with several men and one other woman. One of the soldiers who had been handing out shovels yesterday stood among them, giving orders. They all seemed so calm, just concentrating on sorting the clothing.

So these people had been sent out here first to dig what looked like a garden ready for planting, and then they were sorting clothing? Very odd. And what would they be planting in the middle of the woods?

This excerpt is a good representation of the growing realization of what the Nazis are really up to. Days before this, the townspeople of Viteretz had been relieved by the arrival of the Germans in June 1941 after living under brutal occupation of the Soviets since September 1939.

They think the war is over.

But this scene shows that is these Nazis are not not the civilized Germans the townspeople were expecting, and that the war is far from over: it has just taken an unimaginably horrific turn.

Visit Marsha Forchuk Skrypuch's website.

--Marshal Zeringue