"Wife of the Gods"

Kwei Quartey was raised in Ghana by an African American mother and a Ghanaian father, both of whom were university lecturers. He practices medicine in Southern California, rising early in the morning to write before going to work.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to Wife of the Gods, his debut novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 marks an important part of the novel, Wife of the Gods. A young, beautiful and promising medical student, Gladys Mensah, has been found strangled in Ketanu, a rural town in Ghana’s gorgeous Volta Region. Inspector Darko Dawson is dispatched to Ketanu from the Criminal Investigations Department of the sprawling capital city of Accra to help solve the case, since the authorities don’t trust the local police to do the job.

This page shows the first signs of the tension that will very shortly begin to build up to an explosion between Darko and Ketanu’s police chief, Inspector Max Fiti, who resents Darko’s presence. It is only one of the conflicts Darko will have in this town. Aspects of local culture do not sit well with him, including the widespread belief that witchcraft is responsible for Gladys’s murder, and the traditional practice of indenturing young girls to fetish priests in order to atone for a crime committed by a family member.

But something else troubles Darko about Ketanu. It is the last place that his dear mother was seen alive 25 years ago. The baffling and unsolved disappearance has haunted him to this day. Will his return to Ketanu help resolve this void in his life, or will it only make it worse?

Read an excerpt from Wife of the Gods, and learn more about the book and author at Kwei Quartey's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Trust Me"

Jeff Abbott is a three-time nominee for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Allan Poe Award and a two-time nominee for the Anthony Award. His novel Panic was also been nominated for Best Novel for the Thriller Award. All of Abbott's Whit Mosley suspense novels have been honored with nominations for major writing awards: A Kiss Gone Bad was short-listed for the Anthony Award; Black Jack Point was nominated for the Edgar, Anthony, and Barry Awards; and Cut and Run was nominated for the Edgar Award. His first novel, Do Unto Others, won both the Agatha Award and the Macavity Award for Best First Novel. His other books include The Only Good Yankee, Promises of Home, and Distant Blood.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to his new novel, Trust Me, and reported the following:

Lucky me: page 69 of Trust Me is a moment of high drama.

I decided in Trust Me to create a new kind of criminal profiler: one who profiles extremists. Luke Dantry is a psychology grad student trying to find and stop the next Timothy McVeigh, the next Unabomber, the next person to embrace mass murder as a solution to his problems. By delving online onto extremist web sites (there are thousands of them) and gathering names and identities, Luke hopes to create a way to keep extremists from turning to violence. Basically, he hopes to stop terror in its tracks. His motivation: he lost his father in a random act of mass murder. He never wants another family to suffer as he has.

Luke believes his computer has given him anonymity; that the bad guys are forever on the other side of the glass. But Luke’s online investigations have not gone unnoticed, and he is kidnapped by the very people he has targeted. Locked up and left for dead in a remote cabin, he cleverly manages to escape his leg shackles just as two extremists arrive to kill him. He is nearly clear of the cabin when one of the extremists, a woman, stops him. In this moment, Luke can no longer be simply a grad student playing at profiler.

He must fight to save his life—and he knows exactly how terribly dangerous and deranged his enemies here are. Still wearing shackles on his wrist, unarmed, he faces the woman who would be too happy to murder him:

Behind him the woman called, “You’re not very smart, are you?”

“I guess not.” Luke stood and faced her.

The woman wasn’t even bothering to point the gun at him. She walked close to him, and aimed the flashlight into his face. “Don’t take it the wrong way. I’m amazed you even got halfway free.”

So close, he thought. He noticed she wasn’t aiming the gun at him and wondered if she even considered him a threat. In a flash he thought: You’ve studied these people but you’ve never faced them. This is different than reading a book or a loudmouth posting on the Web. You can’t analyze them, you just have to fight them. Because you know what they’re like. Single-minded. Brutal. Reasoning hadn’t worked with Eric; it wouldn’t work with these two.

Luke felt the quiet scholar in him easing backward, something new and primal emerging.

“Mouser, he’s out here. Still in chains. Looks like he’s auditioning for ‘A Christmas Carol.’” She laughed, a glassy sick giggle. “He looks like Jacob Marley. Or was it Ziggy? I forget. C’mere, schoolboy.”

Luke jumped at her, hammering into her before she could lift the gun, shoving the flashlight so it smacked her in the face. He fell to the grass with her and lassoed a length of the chain around her neck. She swung the gun at him, nailing him in the head, but he was tall and strong and desperate. He got her in front of him, the chain a choker across her throat. He knocked her down, pried the gun from her fingers as he yanked her back to her feet.

For anyone who believes Luke is being ungentlemanly in fighting this woman—know that she is responsible for a devastating bombing that has killed dozens. She’s one of the worst villains I’ve ever written. Page 69 is the point in the book where Luke takes the first step in taking the fight back to the people who destroyed his family.

Read an excerpt from Trust Me and watch the video trailer.

Learn more about the book and author at Jeff Abbott's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"While I'm Falling"

Laura Moriarty is the author of The Center of Everything and The Rest of Her Life.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” and the “Page 99 Test” to her new novel, While I'm Falling, and reported the following:

My new book, While I'm Falling, follows a college-aged protagonist, Veronica, whose parents are in the middle of increasingly hostile divorce. Her mother seems to be suffering more, at least financially. In the beginning, Veronica does her best to stay neutral, focusing on her difficult coursework and a boyfriend who offers the stability she lost when her family fell apart. But when her mother shows up at her dorm needing help, Veronica is forced to consider the real causes and effects of the divorce, and to reconsider the choices she's making in her own life.

One of the early chapters follows Veronica's mother when she's living in her first post-divorce apartment. Page 69 falls in that chapter, so in some ways, p. 69 is not really representative of the whole book, because most of the book follows Veronica, and then Veronica's interactions with her mother and father. But p.69 does sum up her mother's situation and emotional state at the beginning of the book, and I think it's pretty indicative of the themes and topics of the book.

From page 69:

She wanted to lie down in the living room, and to do that, she needed a couch. But she didn't have one. She was forty-nine years old, and after the divorce, she'd been saddled with almost three decades' worth of family furniture and mementos and a Ping-Pong table and a bunch of other junk that was a chore to get rid of; and yet somehow, she didn't have a couch.

Dan, she imagined, had a couch. He'd moved into a furnished condo, leaving everything from their old life behind, like a crab scooting out of a shell. She had been left with the mess, the garage sales, the sorting, the throwing away. And in the middle of all this, the dog, moments after a seizure, had peed on one of the emerald green cushions of the living room sofa. Natalie had actually been a little pleased, the dog's infirmity providing her with an excuse to get rid of the sofa, which was symbolic, she'd decided, of her old life with Dan, which also seemed a little peed-upon, ready to be thrown away. It would be fun, she thought, and equally symbolic, to replace it with something new, something striped, maybe something contemporary, with a hide-a-bed for when on of the girls came to visit.

She'd tried. Sometimes, after work, instead of leaving the mall, she headed straight to the furniture sections of the big department stores, just to see what was out there. She'd sat on striped cushions and pressed her fingertips against cotton twill. She'd quickly gotten overwhelmed by the selection, and also the massiveness of the decision. In those first few months, she was still so raw, and so unsure of herself. After the divorce, such a big failure, she just didn't want to make a bad choice.

On p. 99, Veronica is having an argument/discussion with her father, which is something she hates, as he is much more verbally aggressive than she is. He's mad at her, perhaps justifiably, because she got into a car accident and didn't have her phone with her. In the book as a whole, Veronica's relationship with her mother is given more attention than her relationship with her father. But p. 99 is a good indicator in that the story does follow Veronica's changing relationship with her father. She gets some practice standing up to him, even when she's in the wrong. She's in the wrong for much of the book, in fact. I'm pretty drawn to protagonists who have to learn things the hard way.

Learn more about the book and author at Laura Moriarty's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Last Bridge"

Teri Coyne is an alumna of New York University. In addition to writing fiction, Coyne wrote and performed stand-up comedy for many years. She divides her time between New York City and the North Fork of Long Island.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to The Last Bridge, her first novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 of The Last Bridge finds the main character, Alex “Cat” Rucker remembering an incident from her past where her father, in a fit of drunken rage, blackens her eye by smashing it into a plate of pie during a family meal. In this opening scene, Cat considers leaving home for good. In addition to wanting to get away from her abusive father, she is torn about her feelings for Addison, the son of her father’s best friend who has been staying with the family. With nowhere to go, she returns home and finds Addison weeding her mother’s flower beds and her family gone. A note, left by her mother on her bed explains they have gone to dinner.

These six short paragraphs are representative of the tension in this story. The relationship between Cat and her mother is strained, at best. Her mother is most comfortable leaving notes and avoiding real conversation, so instead of standing up to the father’s mistreatment of his daughter she goes to dinner with him and leaves Cat alone with Addison to scrounge for herself. While there is an undeniable attraction between Cat and Addison, she is trepidatious and weary of all men. This chapter establishes a bond between Cat and Addison that changes the course of Cat’s life. Does it change for the better? Read the book and decide for yourself.

I went to school the next day with a black eye. No one suspected anything was wrong; cuts and bruises were a regular part of being a Rucker kid. People assumed we played hard.

I told Nell that I would walk home. I wanted to be by myself and wasn’t in a big hurry to get back. I thought a lot about leaving for good that day and toyed with the idea of getting a bus ticket for New York and just taking off. The more I thought about it, the happier it made me. There was no reason to stay. Going home would mean facing my father, who would act like it was my fault for getting between him and his pie, and Addison, who would... God, what was I thinking?

Addison was weeding my mother’s flower beds when I came up the drive. He had made good on his warning to get up early. His truck was gone by the time I woke up. On the days he worked at his grandma’s he was usually home by late afternoon.

“Where’s the fire?” He sat back on his heels and waved his small garden shovel at me as I hurried past.

I went through the side door and up the stairs to my room. The house was empty. There was a note on my bed from my mother.

Cat,

Went to supper with Dad and Wendy. Jared is at football practice. There’s leftover macaroni in the fridge.

Mom xxxooo

Read an excerpt from The Last Bridge, and learn more about the book and author at Teri Coyne's website and blog.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Dying for Mercy"

Mary Jane Clark's media thrillers have appeared on the New York Times, USA Today, Publishers Weekly and other national bestseller lists. Her books have been published in 23 languages.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her latest novel Dying for Mercy, and reported the following:

In Dying for Mercy, page 69 starts a chapter. It isn’t even a full page of text. But it does give a good representation of my writing style.

Here, Annabelle Murphy, a KEY News producer with outstanding journalistic instincts which lead her to clues the police can’t always find, is frustrated. She has been working the overnight shift and isn’t able to sleep during the daylight hours. She knows her kids will be home from school soon and that sleep will be impossible then. Anxious and realizing that she isn’t going to drift off, Annabelle decides to get up and take a hot bath.

On the next page, reading a magazine while soaking in the tub, Annabelle notices a tattoo on a movie star’s arm in one of the glossy pictures. She connects the subject of the tattoo to a clue in a puzzling story she’s been working on.

Eureka!

End of chapter.

That’s the way it goes in the chapters of Dying for Mercy and my other books. Clear and speedy. I think that speed ratchets up the suspense. The short chapters, full of action and to the point, create excitement.

I know myself, if I’m reading in bed at night, when I come to the end of a chapter, I’ll look ahead to see how long the next one is. If it’s too lengthy, I put the book down. But if it’s just a few pages, I keep going.

As a suspense writer, my aim is to keep the reader engrossed and turning the pages. Page 69 is a good example of how I do that.

Keep going. Turn that page. See what happens next.

Browse inside Dying for Mercy, and learn more about the book and author at Mary Jane Clark's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Shadow of Betrayal"

Brett Battles is the author of three acclaimed novels in the Jonathan Quinn series: The Cleaner, which was nominated for a Barry Award for Best Thriller and a Shamus Award for Best First Novel, The Deceived, and the newly released Shadow of Betrayal.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to Shadow of Betrayal and reported the following:

Shadow of Betrayal is the third book in the Jonathan Quinn thriller series. Quinn is a cleaner, the guy you call when you think you’re going to have a body you need to get rid of, and that no one will find. In Shadow, Quinn is confronted with a situation of his own making. Earlier he had made a promise to his biggest client, an organization called the Office, that in exchange for some help they gave him on a personal matter, he would do three jobs for them no questions asked. Now the job markers are being called in, and each assignment takes Quinn and his team deeper and deeper in a conspiracy that threatens not only the U.S. government, but also the government of its closest allies.

Page 69 finds Quinn and his partner/girlfriend Orlando in the middle of doing the first job, an investigation in an abandoned New York apartment building. This isn’t a high action scene, but it’s leading up to some. In many ways, it’s very representative of the series, not just the book, in the sense it shows how Quinn and Orlando work together. Kind of a peek into their relationship.

Here it is:

And, for the most part, all were also open. This door was different. It was metal, though it had been painted to look older than it really was.

“Look familiar?” Orlando asked.

Quinn nodded. It looked nearly identical in both texture and color to the metal remains of the door that had been torn and twisted by the explosion.

“I haven’t seen any others like it,” Orlando said. “Peter’s instructions were to look for anything unusual. Thought this might qualify.”

“Definitely.”

Quinn touched the knob, then attempted to turn it. It moved a fraction of an inch before stopping.

“So?” she said. “Do we try to get in?”

Though Quinn thought it might be better to just walk away, that would be neglecting the assignment. And as much as he was annoyed to be here in the first place, that was just not something he would do.

“Not through here,” he said.

He took a few steps down the hall away from the door. As he did, he let his fingers brush against the wall, tapping the surface every few inches. After ten feet he stopped, returned to the door, then did the same thing along the other side.

“Think this is rigged like the staircase?” Orlando asked when he finished.

Quinn looked back at the door, then frowned. “What’s your gut?”

“I think we’d be stupid to think it wasn’t.”

Quinn smiled in agreement.

He took a few paces forward, then stopped at a spot four feet to the right of the door. He touched the wall again. Like elsewhere, it was plaster, probably supported by ancient wooden slats underneath. Only the wall had given in a little at this spot as he pressed against it.

He moved his light through the hallway. Like elsewhere in the building, random junk was scattered along the floor: an old shoe, dozens of empty food containers, newspapers, cardboard boxes, and several pieces of wood in varying shapes and conditions. He wished he’d brought along one of the crowbars Peter had gotten for them, but that would mean a trip back to the car.

Read an excerpt from Shadow of Betrayal, and learn more about the book and author at Brett Battles' website and blog.

The Page 69 Test: The Cleaner.

The Page 69 Test: The Deceived.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Baker Street Letters"

Michael Robertson works for a large company with branches in the United States and England.

He applied the “Page 69 Test” to The Baker Street Letters, his first novel, and reported the following:

If you start with page 69 of The Baker Street Letters, you will probably surmise that the protagonist is British and relatively upscale, and that at the moment he is in a decidedly downscale hotel in the United States, searching for his missing brother.

You would need to read the previous pages to know that both brothers are in the United States because of a letter that an eight-year-old girl in Los Angeles wrote to Sherlock Holmes some twenty years earlier.

For a very long time, the Royal Mail has delivered such letters—most of them written as jokes, but others quite sincere—to a British building society that happens to occupy the entire 200 block of Baker Street in London.

Reggie (the protagonist) has just recently located his law practice in that building. He got a great deal on the lease—but unfortunately he did not notice the tiny clause that makes him now responsible for mail addressed to Sherlock Holmes.

The lease requires that the occupant respond to those posts with a carefully worded form letter—and absolutely nothing beyond that—and Reggie would love for it to be that simple. But it turns out not to be, and by page 69, there has been a murder in Reggie’s law office, and Reggie’s brother—the primary suspect—has taken off to Los Angeles.

Reggie is obliged to follow. By the end of the novel he will have dealt with murders on two continents, and with issues that have been simmering for some time between himself, his brother, and a woman they have both loved. But that won’t stop the letters from arriving at Baker Street, and there will be more of those for Reggie to deal with in the future.

From page 69:

“You want a room, I got one available on the third floor. Clean as a baby’s bottom.”

“No doubt. But what about the room where my brother stayed?”

“I don’t know if my staff has gotten to it yet,” said the clerk.

This was sarcasm. Reggie recognized the tone from weekend holidays in Paris.

“May I see it?”

“You can rent it.”

“Of course,” said Reggie. He paid the full day’s rent with his American money and climbed the stairs, carrying his bag with him.

In Reggie’s experience, American hotel rooms typically smelled too much of bleached linen and antiseptic cleaners. Unfortunately, the rooms of this hotel did not have that fault; the corridor smelled instead of mildew and substances best left unidentified.

Reggie found Nigel’s room. For reasons he did not understand, he knocked first. There was no response. Of course there wasn’t. He opened the door.

He realized now he had half expected that Nigel would still be there, despite the clerk’s assurances that the occupant had checked out.

But there was no one.

The bed, small by American standards, apparently had not been slept in. There was nothing lying about on the faded carpeting to prove Nigel had been there, though Reggie supposed the absence of empty beer cans and whiskey bottles might in itself indicate that the most recent tenant had not been of the usual clientele.

Read an excerpt from The Baker Street Letters, and learn more about the novel at the publisher's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It"

Maile Meloy is the author of the story collection Half in Love, and the novels Liars and Saints, shortlisted for the 2005 Orange Prize, and A Family Daughter. Meloy’s stories have been published in The New Yorker, and she has received The Paris Review’s Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 2007, Meloy was chosen as one of Granta’s Best American Novelists under 35.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new book, the story collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, and reported the following:

This is a long paragraph from page 69 of my story collection Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It. It’s in a story called “Spy vs. Spy.” Aaron’s brother George has invited him skiing, but it turns out he invited Aaron’s college-age daughter (George’s niece) first:

Aaron hung up and spent the rest of the evening fuming at George’s presumption. Aaron’s daughter, Claire, was now a sophomore in college, but he didn’t think of her as someone who could be invited separately on a trip. She was the little girl who had climbed on his head, who had asked him if people could see inside her mind, who had loved his old Mad magazines as he thought no girl had ever loved Mad, giggling at them while he read the paper, asking sometimes to have things explained. Into her teens she had stayed home on weekend nights and watched old movies with him, curled under his arm on the couch, while Bea wandered off, losing interest. He could still feel the weight of his daughter’s head against his chest, and see, cast in silver light from the TV, the rapt absorption with which she watched. The only movie they disagreed on was Rebecca. It was his least favorite Hitchcock, but she loved the sweet, simple girl meeting the rich man with the dark secrets: “I’m asking you to marry me, you little fool,” shouted from his hotel dressing room.

It’s about the way parents struggle to adjust to their children growing up, which is an element in a lot of my stories. I like writing about fathers and daughters, and I like reading about them. Plots about fathers always get to me in movies: I may be the only person who cried at the end of Armageddon.

The story “Spy vs. Spy” is about sibling rivalry, and the girl becomes the center of the struggle between the two brothers. I realized when I was writing the stories in this book that my characters spar in all kinds of ways, but they almost never actually fight. Instead of careful reserve and restraint and tension, I wanted to have a story with an all-out, clumsy, grappling fistfight—on skis, so it’s even clumsier.

The story first appeared on Dave Daley’s site FiveChapters.com, which serializes short stories. His idea was that we all waste time going online and checking out celebrity photos and gossip sites, so why not read five minutes of a short story? He gets great stories from great writers. Ideally there would be links that said Red Carpet Fashion Disaster! that took you straight there.

Read an excerpt from Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It, and learn more about the author and her work at Maile Meloy's website.

The Page 99 Test: Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy"

Charlotte Greig worked as a music journalist in print and radio before becoming a folk singer and songwriter. She has made five albums and written a book on girl groups, Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?: Girl Groups from the 50s On. Greig is also a playwright, for radio and stage.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy, her debut novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 of my novel A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy is, in my view, fairly representative of the rest of the book. The narrator, Susannah, comes over as a rather naïve young woman who is attracted to her boyfriend, Jason, because he’s glamorous and worldly, rather than because she feels any deep emotional connection with him. In fact, it is precisely the lack of emotional connection that, in the wake of her father’s death, draws her to him - although at this point, as in other aspects of her life, her unwillingness to engage has started to become constraining.

She describes their lovemaking in a characteristically unsentimental way as perfunctory and not very satisfying. There is a strong hint here that Jason is gay, although clearly, Susannah doesn’t realise it at this stage, and the reader, too, might well not pick up on it until later.

The fashionable retro clothes are described in detail, as is the antique necklace that Jason gives her, because I wanted to get a feel of the period, the early 1970s. I wondered if modern readers would believe that my central character, Susannah, could have a gay boyfriend and not realise it - which actually, was not that unusual at the time - but nobody seems to have complained about it so far.

One complaint I have had is that there is not enough philosophy in the book (others have complained that there is too much). There certainly isn’t any on this page, or on many of the others. That’s because the book is first and foremost a novel, a story. The protagonist happens to be a philosophy student, and when she becomes pregnant by mistake, she turns to her philosophy books - particularly Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling - for help. It’s not a primer. It’s about how ideas can shape and change our lives, especially when we’re young. I think that’s something different, and on that level, the philosophy is there to provide a commentary on, and hopefully illuminate, Susannah’s central dilemma about whether to have an abortion or not, which comes up later in the story.

Read an excerpt from A Girl’s Guide to Modern European Philosophy, and learn more about the author and her work--both words and music--at Charlotte Greig's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"This Little Mommy Stayed Home"

A graduate of Smith College and Yale Divinity School, Samantha Wilde is a yoga teacher, a minister, and mother of two children born within twenty months of each other.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to her new book, This Little Mommy Stayed Home, and reported the following:

Is it just me or does “69” have vaguely sexual undertones? I can’t say that about my book. The immediate post partum period isn’t the sexiest of times, as any parent knows, and yet protagonist Joy McGuire still manages to find time to fall back in love with her old beau and fall in lust with her yoga teacher while missing her work absorbed husband and changing a lot of cloth diapers.

The book is actually a hilarious tale and the best feedback I get is this: I really did laugh out loud. That said, page 69 isn’t a particularly funny page. Joy is having one of her more reflective moments thinking about her father’s parents and how naturally they bickered. Joy, in her new mom stupor of exhaustion and anger (sometimes at everything), ponders whether “hating your spouse is the stuff marriages are made of.” By the end of the page she is in the presence of her college boyfriend and self-consciously touches her chin only to find “one short, spiky hair,” which begins an unfolding rueful, honest, drama on the mothering of the female body. (She wonders if she will become an old lady with white whiskers, sitting in a nursing home looking “like a half-plucked chicken” and frightening small children.)

How about page 70? That one is much funnier, but then I suppose Joy does have her more serious moments. You can imagine what she thinks when she actually has enough time to pluck her offensive chin hair. Erotic? Not so much. But very true.

My grandfather would sit me down beside him and teach me card games. He was a mean poker player. My grandmother still thought of gambling as sinful. I don’t think she made her way into the modern world. She wore two braids twisted and knotted high on the top of her head. She called my grandfather Pop and he called her Ma and they would shout at each other across the dinner table.

“What did you put in this, Ma?”

“Not good enough for you, then?”

They bickered about food, too much salt, too little, not enough meat, not enough vegetables. I don’t think my father thought any thing of it. I asked him once. ‘That’s just how they are. They love each other; they drive each other crazy.’ They apparently also drover their children crazy because my father’s sister, Hilda, lives in some kind of a special group home for crazy people. I’ve never met her in my life. She’s more a legend than a person. I once saw a picture of her as a girl, and she was mystically beautiful staring out at the camera with a shy smile.

It is Aunt Hilda who eventually shows up and changes Joy’s life.

Preview This Little Mommy Stayed Home, and learn more about the book and author at Samantha Wilde's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"Floodgates"

Mary Anna Evans is the author of the award-winning Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries: Artifacts, Relics, Effigies, Findings, and Floodgates. She's now at work on the sixth in the series, Strangers.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to Floodgates and reported the following:

Any writer posting here who will not confess to feeling a chilly hand on the nape of the neck while scanning page 69 is a bald-faced liar or an egomaniac.

Listen to my thoughts while flipping open Floodgates: "What if I indulged myself in two full manuscript pages of aimless musing? What if my characters are eating breakfast and I spent the entirety of page 69 documenting the crispness of the bacon?"

Imagine my relief at finding that page 69 opens with my protagonists, Faye and Joe, talking with the detective who has hired them as archaeological consultants to an unusual murder case. Joe has just made an excellent point.

True to form, quick-witted Faye has interrupted him in mid-thought. But at least she's self-aware enough to realize that, "...once again, Joe was thinking of people and she was thinking of reasons. She then reflected that if Joe intended to talk at any time, for the rest of his life, then his wife-to-be would be smart to buy herself a muzzle--before he bought one and strapped it on her."

More conversation follows, then all three characters bend over some important evidence, two photographs found folded in the pocket of the victim, Shelly. They are aerial photos of Shelly's New Orleans neighborhood, one taken sometime before Katrina struck and one taken immediately after.

Joe's response to a scene that I describe as "a dark and tragic stain" is the only appropriate one, just a hushed whisper that says, "Look at all that water."

In stark contrast, the older photo shows "regular, everyday, dry city streets full of cars, signifying that day-to-day life was proceeding as usual. There were no tarps on roofs nor any swaths of empty land, where the houses that should have been there had been washed away."

After a moment of staring at the enormity of what happened to New Orleans in 2005, Joe brings the conversation back to the murder but, as Joe always will, he does it in human terms. He wants to know why Shelly was carrying before-and-after photos of Lakeview, when her body was found miles away, in the Lower Ninth Ward.

To tell you more of the story, I'd have to turn to page 70, and that's not what this essay is about. Nevertheless, page 69 holds key fragments of the story I set out to tell in Floodgates. It's the story of real people who love each other and laugh and work hard, but who are completely unable to grasp the full scope of a drowned city ... an American city, a city full of people just like the rest of us.

In Floodgates, I try to show you that immense tragedy but, in the end, it's far easier to feel real, personal grief for a single person. So I've given you Faye and Joe and Jodi and their search for justice for Shelly, a woman who died trying to save people she loved and people she never even met. And all the while, Shelly was carrying a photo of her drowned home in the pocket of her wet blue jeans.

Read an excerpt from Floodgates, and learn more about the author and her work at Mary Anna Evans' website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue

"April & Oliver"

Tess Callahan has an MFA in Fiction from Bennington College and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Cottonwood, The Stylus Anthology: 1950-2000, The Boston College Magazine, New York Newsday and elsewhere.

She applied the “Page 69 Test” to April & Oliver, her debut novel, and reported the following:

What luck! Page 69 happens to contain a nugget of dialogue that goes to the heart of April & Oliver. In fact, I briefly considered titling the novel with an excerpt from this page until my writing group convinced me it was a ludicrous idea. They said that my proposed title, The Man Who Couldn’t Burn Toast, sounded more like a Will Ferrell comedy than the dark, enigmatic story of April and Oliver. They were right, of course.

The novel is about childhood friends reunited after the death of April’s teenage brother. Inseparable as children, April and Oliver now find themselves virtual strangers. Oliver seems to have a grounded life as a law student newly engaged to be married. April, with a tendency for recklessness, appears to be headed for a downward spiral in the wake of her brother’s death. Oliver feels compelled to save her, but it soon becomes apparent that he has secrets of his own, and cracks appear in the foundation of his carefully constructed life. The magnetic attraction and polar resistance between the two is driven by a desire by each to recover some lost part of himself that may or may not be recoverable.

On page 69, Oliver is talking with the elderly Nana, who knows both April and him intimately. In the course of conversation, Oliver says, “I hate to break it to you, Nana, but I’ve got my vices.”

To this, Nana sassily replies, “Well, I certainly hope so. A man who goes through life without burning a piece of toast will never get what he wants.”

Oliver is a man who desperately needs to make mistakes. This is apparent to Nana, but not to Oliver himself.

Nana adds, “Now April, she’s another story. Can’t put a slice in the toaster without burning down the house.”

“Well, I’ll try not to go that far,” Oliver replies.

“Unless that’s what it takes,” Nana says.

Oliver is vaguely unsettled by her quip. Part of him – a part he doesn’t readily acknowledge – knows that his wizened old grandmother is on to something.

Read an excerpt from April & Oliver, and learn more about the novel and author at Tess Callahan's website.

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

--Marshal Zeringue