"How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder"

Nina McConigley was born in Singapore and raised in Wyoming. Her short-story collection Cowboys and East Indians was the winner of the PEN Open Book Award and a High Plains Book Award. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Orion, Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly Review, High Country News, O, Oprah Magazine, Parents, Virginia Quarterly Review, American Short Fiction, and The Asian American Literary Review among others.

McConigley applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, How to Commit a Postcolonial Murder, and reported the following:

From page 69:

But poor Papa, poor Papa

He’s got nothing at all


And Mama eats ham, and Mama eats lamb

Mama eats bread with strawberry jam

But poor Papa, poor Papa

He eats nothing at all

Amma taught it to us one day when we had a wet spring snow that snapped the power lines in two. She made a fire and roasted hot dogs over the fire with chopsticks. Vinny Uncle was sleeping. Auntie Devi was at work. We wrapped ourselves in sleeping bags. Narayan sang the loudest of us all, his thumbs hooked under imaginary suspenders as he marched through the house. Vinny Uncle woke up and joined us. He and Amma sang loud and clear. All of us danced. And then Agatha Krishna switched to “Papa Don’t Preach.” Her hair had started to grow back and she was trying to style it like Madonna. We all laughed.

But most days, we were in a house of women. Most days we felt the air between Amma and Auntie Devi. The only songs were Agatha Krishna trying to record songs off the radio with her tape deck.

After Vinny Uncle died, we never sang like that again. Our fathers were gone—one dead, one on the rigs. Poor, poor papas.

I think if a browser opened the book to page 69 they would get a sense of the book. In that so much of the book is the day-to-day, the quotidian, at the house, Cottonwood Cross. The page opens with an old folk song, "Poor Papa," which the kids perform. It was performed by the mother in India and now in Wyoming by the girls. It harkens back to a nostalgia and an enamoring of all things Western. It also shows how the house is mostly a house of women. The men are absent or weak.

What page 69 reveals is that even with the horrors of the house, there is happiness and a kind of joy. There is a coziness of fires and hot dogs and songs. We also see the innocence of the children, and how much they are kids. And even within the scene of domestic unity, there is something underlying that is dangerous. Poor Papa is starving, and in a way, the girls are too.

Visit Nina McConigley's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Jean"

Madeleine Dunnigan is a writer and screenwriter from London. She was a Jill Davis Fellow on the MFA at New York University. While there she was awarded a GRI Fellowship in Paris.

Dunnigan applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Jean, and shared the following:

On page 69 of Jean, readers are thrust into the end of a scene in which our protagonist Jean is breaking rocks. This, we are told, is a punishment he must serve, having hit Tom, another boy in the school. Jean considers the material he is breaking: it is Wealden Clay, which dates back to the Hauterivian and Bavarian times. As he breaks rocks he thinks about this: how he is ‘literally’ cracking through time. This sparks another thought about a letter he received that morning. The postage stamp is from a week ago, which means the letter is something from the past. Thus Micky, who wrote it, has already enacted what in the letter was only a promise. He has already gone away.

Now the narrative jumps backward from 1976 to 1969 when Micky, or rather Mick Caro, a famous rock star, moves onto Jean’s street in Holland Park, London. Mick Caro’s arrival causes a buzz a half-mile radius around. Jean, who asked for Mick Caro’s latest EP for Christmas, plays it all day. Rosa, his mother, mutters that the area is going downhill now the celebrities have moved in. Then the builders arrive, whole droves of them, to begin construction on Micky’s new house and it is this that sends Rosa ‘crackers.’

The Page 69 Test makes for an interesting read of my novel… This page is split between the end of one scene and the beginning of another, leaving many questions for the reader. Who is Jean and where is he? Who is Tom? Who is Micky? Where has he left and where is he going?

A little intuition might serve her well – clearly Tom is someone Jean shouldn’t have hit, and Jean is breaking rocks as a punishment. Such punishments happen in places of authority, like schools. Jean must have strong feelings about Tom in order to hit him, she might assume. Indeed Jean is set in a hippie, rural English boarding school for boys with ‘problems’. Jean is our antisocial and violent protagonist. The novel centres around his relationship with another boy in the school, Tom, and their burgeoning romance. Although this doesn’t come through strongly on page 69, there is at least a hint that something is going on between them.

The other person mentioned on page 69 is Micky. Clearly, Micky is also someone important to Jean if he is thinking about him. The slip into backstory tells the reader that she is about to find out who exactly Micky is and why he is important to Jean.

Yet I fear that the lack of context on page 69, and the shifting between so many characters and settings might confuse the reader. At its heart Jean is a boarding school novel about a boy, Jean, who is at odds with the world around him. Tom offers him escape in the form of love; yet Jean’s complicated past (of which Micky is a part) prevents him from true intimacy. Yet on page 69 none of these things are obvious.

In short, there are hints at the larger themes of the book – Jean’s violence, his repression at school, his complicated relationship with men, his broader existential musings, his difficult mother and his troubled past. Perhaps these will confuse the reader, or perhaps they will be just enough to wet her tastebuds and encourage her to read more…

Visit Madeleine Dunnigan's website.

My Book, The Movie: Jean.

--Marshal Zeringue

"What Boys Learn"

Born in Chicago and now a resident of Vancouver Island, Canada, Andromeda Romano-Lax worked as a freelance journalist and travel writer before turning to fiction. Her first novel, The Spanish Bow, was translated into eleven languages and chosen as a New York Times Editors’ Choice, BookSense pick, and one of Library Journal’s Best Books of the Year. Her next four novels, The Detour, Behave (an Amazon Book of the Month), Plum Rains (winner of the Sunburst Award), and Annie and the Wolves (a Booklist Top 10 Historical Fiction Book of the Year) reflect her diverse interest in the arts, history, science, and technology, as well as her love of travel and her time spent living abroad. Starting with The Deepest Lake (a Barnes & Noble Monthly Pick and Amazon Book of the Month) and continuing with her new novel, What Boys Learn, Romano-Lax has swerved into the world of suspense fiction, although she continues to write historical and speculative fiction as well.

She applied the Page 69 Test to What Boys Learn with the following results:

On page 69, Abby starts to question what her sixteen-year-old son Benjamin is telling her about a stupid thing he was just caught doing: breaking into a neighbor’s house to steal a girl’s diary. Worse yet, another girl in town was recently found dead. Abby has ignored lots of signs up until this moment, but now she’s getting wise. We get hints that her ex-boyfriend, a cop, might be fibbing about the break-in as well. This page encapsulates the stakes and the world we’re in, where you can’t trust anyone and the choices a woman makes—in her family, in her love life—may not be good ones.

On top of that, the scene on this page alludes to something Abby found in Benjamin’s room. And that discovery takes us into Abby’s past, when her brother—now in prison—hid a similar item. The plot’s many strands criss-cross this page in multiple places!

Visit Andromeda Romano-Lax's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Spanish Bow.

The Page 69 Test: The Detour.

Writers Read: Andromeda Romano-Lax (February 2012).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Reckoning"

A critically-acclaimed, bestselling author of crime fiction, Kelli Stanley is the author of the award-winning Miranda Corbie historical noir series (City of Dragons, City of Secrets, City of Ghosts, City of Sharks), featuring "one of crime's most arresting heroines" (Library Journal), private investigator Miranda Corbie, and set in 1940 San Francisco.

Stanley also writes an award-winning, highly-praised series set in Roman Britain (Nox Dormienda; The Curse-Maker).

Her newest novel, The Reckoning, is a first-in-series mystery-thriller set in Northern California's "Emerald Triangle" in 1985.

Stanley applied the Page 69 Test to The Reckoning and reported the following:

I love this test! Not because it accurately captures the essence of a book—it really couldn’t, not with a crime fiction novel’s potential for twists, turns and the rolling-hill cadence of suspense and setting—but because it’s simply fun!

So here’s the first part of page 69 from The Reckoning. That page happens to feature the end of one scene and the beginning of the next. We’ll tackle the end of the scene.

“Though what’s happened—Jennie—so, so horrible and scary. I hope to God they find this—this monster soon.”

He shook his head. “She’s not the first. And I’m worried—very worried—that she won’t be the last.”

Another older man in a sweater was waving him down from the bleachers and he looked at his empty hands with chagrin.

“I’m sorry—I need to get back in line. I told Copely I’d buy him a hot dog—he’s the choir master at South Fork and my—hope to God!—temporary roommate. I hope we can talk again, Natalie. Maybe you could come to the school and speak to my English class about law school preparation—we need all the outside influence—outside of Humboldt County, I mean—that we can muster.”

“I’m sure I’d like that. You can always reach me through the hospital.”

“Count on it.”

He trotted back to the Snack Shack. Renata stared after him.

She wanted to know more about Ian Sharpe—and why Phyllis Dawson said he “ruined” girls.

She slid into the bleachers. Two rows down, Mike was deep in conversation with a large man who was bending over to hear him better.

Wayne Hunt.

OK, what may we surmise from this—and does it hold true for the book?

First, something’s wrong—something happened. Whatever happened to Jennie, she was not the first. Serial killer in (yes, the setting is mentioned!) Humboldt County?

Check. That is the main plot line of the novel, so page 69 came through!

The bleachers and Snack Shack suggest a game, and from his dialog, Ian Sharpe sounds like a high school English teacher at a school named South Fork. So, high school football game?

Check. A high school football game plays a major role in the story.

The diction, pace and tone of the passage conveys an unsettled, uneasy feeling. I think the page does a good, understated job at suggesting a sense of dread, something I’ve tried to express throughout the narrative—as though there’s a fuse running and a bomb’s about to go off. “Ruined” girls”? Who is Phyllis Dawson? Why is Renata—whom Ian is calling “Natalie” —focused on the man called Hunt? Is she a cop? A lawyer? Why the double name? Who is Mike? Page 69 raises some provocative questions!

All of the information is crucial to the characters and the plot, but what the page achieves most effectively, I think, is capturing some of the emotional tension that runs very high throughout the novel. The Reckoning is a slow-burning thriller and you never know what’s around the corner—at a shop, a library or a high school football game in a tiny town in the middle of the woods. Even the fact that the page contains a break between two scenes emphasizes the relentlessness of time, an element which is not in Renata’s favor.

All in all, I think page 69 hits the mark in some unexpected ways!

Visit Kelli Stanley's website.

Coffee with a Canine: Kelli Stanley & Bertie.

The Page 69 Test: City of Dragons.

The Page 69 Test: City of Secrets.

The Page 69 Test: City of Ghosts.

My Book, The Movie: City of Ghosts.

The Page 69 Test: City of Sharks.

My Book, The Movie: City of Sharks.

Writers Read: Kelli Stanley (March 2018).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Asterwood"

Jacquelyn Stolos grew up in Derry, New Hampshire. She loves tromping through the forest and reading good books.

Asterwood is her first novel for children.

Stolos holds an MFA in fiction from NYU, where she was a Writers in the Public School Fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in Joyland and No Tokens. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughter.

Stolos applied the Page 69 Test to Asterwood and shared the following:

From page 69 of Asterwood:

Quick and silent, Madelyn followed Fern down the slope to their camp, where Matthew was stuffing the last tent pole into his lumpy pack.

"Cannibals?" whispered Calle.

Fern nodded.

Calle's eyes widened.

"She has our scent," said Fern, tossing Madelyn her pack. "And she'll be after us as soon as she regains consciousness."

"She had two men with her,” Madelyn offered, pulling the pack’s straps over her raw shoulders.

“We’re well aware,” snapped Fern.

Calle gestured toward a tree, where the two men were unconscious, gagged, and bound. A chill tickled down Madelyn’s spine.

“They were here?” she asked.

“Watching us from the bushes.” Fern patted the blowgun in her belt. “I’d say we have a little under an hour to put as much distance between ourselves and them as we can. Cannibals are fast, crafty, and incredibly intelligent.

On page 69 of Asterwood, Madelyn had just been rescued by Fern from an unsettling encounter with a bewitching woman wearing a crown of yellowing bones. The two rejoin The New Hopefuls at their camp where Madelyn learns that cannibals lurk in the enchanted forest of Asterwood, and, in wandering away from the group and interacting with this woman, she’s put her new friends in grave danger. Now they must pack up and flee through the night forest.

The Page 69 Test works well for Asterwood. This excerpt demonstrates the adrenaline and adventure threaded through the novel, while also giving a taste of the friendship dynamics that drive Madelyn, who begins the book feeling like an outsider in her small, New Hampshire town and finds herself over the course of her adventures with this crew of tenacious misfits. More, Madelyn’s encounter with the cannibals by campfire was inspired by Bilbo Baggins’ campfire encounter with the man-eating trolls in The Hobbit. Readers can expect more notes of Tolkien throughout Asterwood. I was a huge fan at the age of Asterwood’s readers (and still am!). The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy was an enormous influence in how I imagined and wrote this woodland adventure.

Visit Jacquelyn Stolos's website.

Writers Read: Jacquelyn Stolos.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Flightless Birds of New Hope"

Farah Naz Rishi is a Pakistani-American Muslim writer and voice actor, but in another life, she’s worked stints as a lawyer, a video game journalist, and an editorial assistant. She received her B.A. in English from Bryn Mawr College, her J.D. from Lewis & Clark Law School, and her love of weaving stories from the Odyssey Writing Workshop. When she’s not writing, she’s probably hanging out with video game characters. Rishi lives in Philadelphia.

She applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Flightless Birds of New Hope, with the following results:

Page 69 of The Flightless Birds of New Hope looks backward. Aden is ten. His sister, Aliza, is five. Their parents have left them home alone for the evening to attend a dinner party—something they still occasionally did back then, before their lives narrowed around bird shows and ribbons and the long, obsessive weekends that followed. Before Coco became the center of their world. Before everything began to orbit her.

Aden makes peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for himself and his sister and puts on Finding Nemo, Aliza’s favorite movie at the time. He lets her curl up on the couch beside him, eyelids fluttering, the crust of her sandwich still clutched in one hand. Within minutes, she’s asleep. The house seems to register it too: walls settling, silence blooming in the corners. Aden allows himself, briefly, to breathe with it. His shoulders loosen. A rare indulgence. Then he goes to check on Coco, the family’s cockatoo, sitting in her cage in the corner of the living room, “like a piece of furniture someone had forgotten to move.”

I think a browser opening the book to page 69 would get a true—if partial—sense of the whole. Not the plot, exactly—this is not a novel propelled by spectacle—but the emotional logic of the book. This page contains many of the forces that shape the story: a child stepping into a caretaker role, a family consumed by both obsession and neglect, and a quiet, almost imperceptible shift in what home truly feels like. The book unfolds in moments like this, where nothing is announced and everything is already changing.

What page 69 reveals is how The Flightless Birds of New Hope understands love and loss: not as singular events, but as slow accumulations. Aden isn’t frightened or resentful here. He’s capable. Attentive. Even calm. But that calm carries weight. It’s the kind that settles into a body early and never quite leaves. The Flightless Birds of New Hope is built from these small domestic scenes—children depending on each other, their house holding its breath, love expressed through action rather than words. If a browser were to read only this page, they might not know where the story goes, but they would know how it moves: slowly, inwardly, and with an understanding that the ordinary moments are the ones that end up mattering most.

Visit Farah Naz Rishi's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Flightless Birds of New Hope.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Beth Is Dead"

Katie Bernet is the author of Beth Is Dead, a Junior Library Guild Gold Standard Selection. She’s an award-winning creative director and a long-standing member of the DFW Writer’s Workshop. As the oldest of three sisters, she’s a diehard fan of Little Women.

Bernet applied the Page 69 Test to Beth Is Dead, her debut novel, and reported the following:

Very interesting. Page 69 of Beth Is Dead is a quieter scene—not one of the fast-paced, drama-filled scenes you’ll find in the rest of the book—but it establishes one of the novel’s deeper themes. This book is a modern retelling of Little Women as a mystery-thriller in which Beth March is found murdered in chapter one. Page 69 is part of a flashback that plunges the reader into Beth’s perspective. On this page, she’s talking to a cute boy (hello, romantic subplot) and revealing that she and her sisters have been the unwilling subjects of their dad’s controversial bestselling novel. Beth doesn’t like how she’s portrayed in her dad’s book. She says, “Perfect isn’t always a good thing. He wrote me as someone who never pushes back, never speaks up, never wants anything, I mean really wants anything, for herself.” In Beth Is Dead, Beth March and her sisters push against their stereotypes and expand their views of themselves and each other—and page 69 crystalizes that concept. It’s also the first spark of a love story between Beth March and one of the Hummels, so if you’ve ever wanted more for Beth—more joy, more fire, more drama—I think you’ll enjoy what’s established on page 69.

Visit Katie Bernet's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Star Society"

Gabriella Saab is the author of The Last Checkmate and Daughters of Victory. She graduated from Mississippi State University with a bachelor of business administration in marketing and lives in her hometown of Mobile, Alabama, where she works as a barre instructor. She is of Lebanese heritage and is one of the co-hosts of @hfchitchat on Twitter, a recurring monthly chat and community celebrating the love of reading and writing historical fiction.

Saab applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Star Society, and shared the following:

Page 69 of The Star Society falls in a very satisfying place: the beginning of a chapter, Chapter 9. This novel is about two sisters, Ada and Ingrid, and is told from both their perspectives. Chapter 9 is from Ingrid’s perspective, the first paragraph of which reads as follows:

After last night’s conversation with her sister, Ingrid has not yet notified Crenshaw of her success, despite the condition placed upon her investigation. For a time, their reunion is theirs alone. Now that she has made contact, the real work will begin—inserting herself into Ada’s world, meeting Ada’s friends, exploring every rumor, securing an invitation to Ada’s Star Society, uncovering the truth about the organization. Everything she is determined to do to protect her sister from the threats overtaking her industry. Everything Crenshaw believes she will be unable to do.

This paragraph sums up the premise of the novel almost perfectly: the year is 1946, and Ingrid is a private investigator. During the war, she lost touch with her sister, Ada, but now that communist influences are thought to be overtaking Hollywood, Ingrid has been sent to investigate an actress, Ada, who is suspected of communist ties and who hosts a social group, known as the Star Society, which is thought to be a communist front organization.

Right away, Ingrid realizes this actress is her sister, and she is determined to protect Ada from the threat of communism. Ingrid’s employer, Crenshaw, has allowed her one week to make contact with Ada, and if she fails, she will be replaced. She is a woman, so naturally he expects her to fail. But making contact is much easier for Ingrid than Crenshaw realizes, considering this actress is her sister. Still, Ingrid must handle the situation delicately. If her employer finds out she’s investigating her own relative, she will be replaced, then she will not be able to protect Ada from the communist threats. Neither can she tell her sister what she’s actually doing in Hollywood, because with this assignment comes strict orders of confidentiality.

The novel is about the bond of sisterhood as they wrestle the lingering effects of war and the fear and paranoia that overtook Hollywood during the rise of the Red Scare, and I think the Page 69 Test works very well. This page captures Ingrid’s commitment to her work as well as her unwavering loyalty to her sister. This bond is what carries both women through the events of the story even as both wrestle with moral complexities such as the one Ingrid is facing in this chapter.

Visit Gabriella Saab's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Happiness Collector"

Crystal King is the author of four novels spanning historical fiction and contemporary fantasy. Her latest, The Happiness Collector, is a contemporary fantasy that Booklist calls "a must for V.E. Schwab and Katee Robert fans" and was named an Amazon Editor's Pick. Her historical novels include In the Garden of Monsters (longlisted for a MassBook Award and selected as an Amazon Editor's Pick), The Chef's Secret, and Feast of Sorrow (longlisted for the Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize). King's writing is fueled by a love of history and a passion for the food, language, and culture of Italy.

She applied the Page 69 Test to The Happiness Collector with the following results:

On page 69, historian Aida Reale is settling into her dream job at MODA in Italy when she hears unsettling gossip about her predecessor, Johannes, who died suddenly of a heart attack. Ilario and Pippa, who work in the kitchen at the palazzo where she's staying, discuss the man with concern that hints at something darker beneath the surface. The conversation reveals cryptic details about individuals at MODA, including their mysterious boss Mo, and Trista, Aida's prickly aide.

Does the Page 69 Test Work?

This test works somewhat well for The Happiness Collector. While page 69 won't tell you that Aida's employers are gods or that she's collecting happiness for divine purposes, it captures the book's central tension: something is very wrong with this too-good-to-be-true job. The mention of a predecessor's death, the cryptic comments about crossing their snarky boss, and Aida's growing unease all signal that her Italian dream is actually a nightmare in disguise.

What the page does reveal accurately is the book's atmosphere of mystery. Aida is clearly picking up on strange undercurrents in conversations around her. The dialogue gives you a taste of the Italian setting and the dark humor that runs through the narrative. You get a sense that Aida is smart and observant but a bit in the dark about her employer.

What you won't get from this page is the mythological framework that makes The Happiness Collector more than just a mystery. You won't know that Aida and her colleagues are pawns in a game between gods, or that the places that Aida visits as part of her work are starting to disappear. But you will understand that Aida has stumbled into something dangerous and that her perfect new life is built on secrets that might destroy the world as we know it.

Still, for readers who love contemporary fantasy with a slow-burn reveal, page 69 does its job: it raises questions, hints at danger, and makes you want to keep reading to find out what everyone is hiding.

Visit Crystal King's website.

The Page 69 Test: Feast of Sorrow.

Writers Read: Crystal King (March 2019).

The Page 69 Test: The Chef's Secret.

My Book, The Movie: The Happiness Collector.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Watch Us Fall"

Christina Kovac, author of the Watch Us Fall and The Cutaway, writes psychological suspense/thrillers set in Washington, DC.

Prior to writing fiction, Kovac worked in television news, covering crime and politics at Fox 5’s Ten O’Clock News in Washington, DC, and after that as a news producer and desk editor at the Washington Bureau of NBC News.

She lives outside Washington DC with her family. She loves morning writes with her cat on her lap, book hauls from her town library, and hiking national parks. Her favorites—C&O Canal National Park, Assateague Island, and Rock Creek Park—provided inspiration for Watch Us Fall. She’s currently at work on her third novel.

Kovac applied the Page 69 Test to Watch Us Fall and reported the following:

From page 69, which takes place at a dinner party, where Josh Egan first meets Addie’s friends:

Their conversations flew fast, skipping easily between movies and books and music, stories half told and finished by each other. He felt a little dazzled by them. Estella refilled his wine. “Tell Josh about the Obama niece, Lucy.”

“Let’s not,” Lucy said.

Josh thanked her for the wine. Then, to Lucy: “Does President Obama have a niece?”

“Oh God, no, this is embarrassing,” Addie said, laughing, and Josh squeezed her hand saying, “Well now somebody has to tell it.”

Estella tossed her hair. “It was Addie’s alter ego in college.”

“We’d go to parties and guys would hit on Addie,” Lucy said. “She could never kick free of this certain type of guy that always gravitated to her.”

Estella interrupted. “The saddest, drunkest, most pathetic...”

Penelope lifted her eyebrows. “These guys would ask for Addie’s number, and she’d crumble, afraid to hurt anyone’s feelings.”

“Who likes hurting people?” Addie asked.

Estella pointed her fork at Lucy. “So Lucy developed her alias. Alter ego, whatever. Remember that first guy hounding Addie for her Instagram handle? So Lucy moves in with something to the effect of, ‘I’m sorry, but she’s under orders from the Secret Service to observe a strict social media blackout. I’m sure you can understand... her uncle, you know?’”

“I was thinking, play her off as some foreign dignitary’s kid,” Lucy said. “The university is lousy with them. But the guy assumed President Obama, so.”

Addie was shaking her head, laughing. “I never said anything about President Obama. I never gave any name. He just said I looked just like my uncle and then everyone started agreeing, and it took off from there.”

“You look nothing like President Obama,” Josh said.

“We were treated so nicely after that, remember?” Penelope said.

Here Josh finds the four friends fiercely protective of each other, willing to do whatever it takes to keep each other safe. In this case, it’s Addie’s vulnerability to helping broken people. This page is actually representative of the themes of the novel—friendship and obsessive love and how far we’ll go to protect each other, as well as the shifting, conflicting stories we tell, and the delusions this creates. It is also part of a pivotal scene in the novel. And we see the love and humor and history the women share with each other.

The novel uses two points-of-views: Lucy’s in present-day narration that begins on the day Josh goes missing, and Josh’s in the past month’s events leading up to that terrible day.

This page is from Josh’s point-of-view. He doesn’t understand their inside stories. As a celebrity journalist (a la Ronan Farrow with a bit of a JFK Jr. mystique), Josh has firm thoughts about truth and lies. For his own traumatic reasons, he’s afraid them. Lies are a Josh Egan trigger.

And here, on page 69, the woman he’s obsessively in love with is laughing with her friends about lies they so easily tell. He will come to wonder about other lies. Soon after that, Josh disappears.

Visit Christina Kovac's website.

My Book, The Movie: The Cutaway.

The Page 69 Test: The Cutaway.

Writers Read: Christina Kovac (March 2017).

My Book, The Movie: Watch Us Fall.

--Marshal Zeringue

"May Contain Murder"

After being flung into the culinary limelight as a semi-finalist on Masterchef, Orlando Murrin edited Woman and Home, BBC Good Food and founded Olive magazine; then he switched track to become a chef-hotelier in SW France and Somerset.

He has written six cookbooks and received an Outstanding Achievement Award from the Guild of Food Writers, its highest accolade. A popular guest on TV and radio, and at food and literary festivals, he is also a regular podcaster and podcast host.

From his grandfather, a Met detective who rose to become a crack MI5 interrogator, he inherited a fascination with crime and mystery. He lives in domestic bliss in Exeter, Devon, and has written two culinary crime novels: Knife Skills For Beginners and Murder Below Deck (published as May Contain Murder in Canada and the US). Knife Skills was shortlisted for McDermid Debut Award, Crime Fiction Lover Debut Award, CrimeFest Last Laugh Award and Fingerprint Debut Award.

Murrin applied the Page 69 Test to May Contain Murder and shared the following:

On page 69 our narrator Paul Delamare finds himself at dinner aboard the magnificent superyacht Maldemer, on the second night of her cruise from the London’s Tower Bridge to the Caribbean.

Paul is a waspish character – even slightly cruel – and here we find him criticising one of his dining companions, a vegetarian called Karol-Kate, for ‘chewing in a circular motion’. He expands on this: ‘I remember a geography lesson in which we learned the different ways ruminants eat: cows by pulling up tufts of grass with great long tongues; sheep with their teeth, nibble-nibble-nibble. I half expect her to moo.’

The Page 69 Test works well for my book – it gives a flavour of the banter and social comedy for which the chef Paul Delamare mysteries are known.

I would have loved it even more if page 69 had also landed the browser with some of the book’s other fun elements: for instance, the reproductions of actual tarot cards, or the email exchanges between Paul and his best friend Julie, stuck back in London, which add a hilarious extra dimension to the book.

I’d also like the reader to flip to the epilogue, which contains an imaginary magazine article written by Paul Delamare with six delicious recipes. These are real, working recipes, in American cup measures, including the Poseidon Adventure Cocktail and a devilishly delicious chocolate cake based on Julia Child’s immortal Gâteau Reine de Saba.

I’m not sure if readers realise what a fantastically complicated book this was to write! Whenever Paul sends an email he gives his coordinates in the Atlantic Ocean, which I wanted to be accurate. This involved plotting a course to an imaginary island, while the boat was being blown off-course by a terrible storm. On top of that, the yacht kept crossing time-zones. By the time I’d finished writing it, I felt I’d done a Masters in navigation. Plus don’t start me on international maritime law…

Visit Orlando Murrin's website.

The Page 69 Test: Knife Skills for Beginners.

Q&A with Orlando Murrin.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Huguette"

Cara Black is the author of twenty-one books in the New York Times bestselling Aimée Leduc series as well as the WWII thrillers Three Hours in Paris and Night Flight to Paris. She has won the Médaille de la Ville de Paris and the Médaille d’Or du Rayonnement Culturel and received multiple nominations for the Anthony and Macavity Awards; her books have been translated into German, Norwegian, Japanese, French, Spanish, Italian, and Hebrew.

Black applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Huguette, with the following results:

From page 69:

Huguette says:

"I can speak GI English, and I'm good with numbers. You've seen the housekeeping budget Marie gave me, and I kept my father's accounts in the café since I was thirteen. And....after maman went to the sanatorium, my father had me keep two ledgers."

Louis's face barely changed. He nodded slowly. "One ledger for the tax man and another for himself, oui?"

"You could say that, monsieur."

Louis reached in his silk bathrobe pocket. Handed her a key. "Unlock the bottom drawer in my desk. Take out two ledgers in there."

She did.

"Now make coffee. We've got work to do."

This page shows Huguette, in survivor mode trying to be useful and keep her job with Louis. This also illustrates her background in that she's no stranger to clandestine accounting and Louis, sharp as a tack, reading between the lines and seeing her skills and usefullness.

In my mind writing this scene I kept hearing a line from the film Casablanca where Rick says to the French policeman as they walk off into the fog "Louis I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship."

And for Huguette and Louis page 69 starts their friendship and working relationship. He becomes Huguette's mentor, her entree to the world of French cinema, to his connections and in return she does his black market dealings. In the set up we've learned Louis is desperate to avoid bankruptcy, has dreams for the French film industry and can read people and spot talent. Huguette becomes vital in his dealings and she's no stranger to the black market. She's also afraid to be back on the street and go hungry again so to her, it's her only choice.

Visit Cara Black's website and follow her on Instagram and Threads.

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--Marshal Zeringue