Pg. 99: Christian L. Bolden's "Out of the Red"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Out of the Red: My Life of Gangs, Prison, and Redemption by Christian L. Bolden.

About the book, from the publisher:

Out of the Red is one man’s pathbreaking story of how social forces and personal choices combined to deliver an unfortunate fate. After a childhood of poverty, institutional discrimination, violence, and being thrown away by the public education system, Bolden's life took him through the treacherous landscape of street gangs at the age of fourteen. The Bloods offered a sense of family, protection, excitement, and power. Incarcerated during the Texas prison boom, the teenage former gangster was thrust into a fight for survival as he navigated the perils of adult prison. As mass incarceration and prison gangs swallowed up youth like him, survival meant finding hope in a hopeless situation and carving a path to his own rehabilitation. Despite all odds, he forged a new path through education, ultimately achieving the seemingly impossible for a formerly incarcerated ex-gangbanger.

Learn more about Out of the Red at the Rutgers University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Out of the Red.  

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: D.S. Butler's "House of Lies"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: House of Lies (Detective Karen Hart Book 4) by D. S. Butler.

About the book, from the publisher:

A dark secret. A haunted past. And a house full of lies.

When two teenage girls vanish without a trace from an educational retreat at Chidlow House in Lincolnshire, the students and teachers are put on high alert.

Called in to investigate, Detective Karen Hart questions everyone who came into contact with the two girls, Cressida and Natasha, in the days leading up to their disappearance.

Stories of Chidlow House being haunted abound, but Hart—still coming to terms with the suspicious circumstances surrounding the tragic loss of her own family—knows that while the house might be otherworldly, the crime is grimly real.

But nothing is quite as it seems at Chidlow House. When it becomes clear that someone at the estate must know more than they’re letting on, Hart faces a race against time to find the culprit and save the girls.

While there is no shortage of suspects, Hart comes up against one dead end after another. And when she too begins hearing eerie whispers in the walls, she is forced to wonder: was she too quick to dismiss Chidlow’s supernatural reputation?

Visit D.S. Butler's website.

My Book, The Movie: Bring Them Home.

The Page 69 Test: Bring Them Home.

Writers Read: D. S. Butler (November 2018).

The Page 69 Test: House of Lies.

--Marshal Zeringue

Sarah Tolmie's "The Fourth Island," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Fourth Island by Sarah Tolmie.

The entry begins:

Who would want to make a movie of a quiet sort of book set in an imaginary Aran island in 1840, before the famine? Jim Sheridan, perhaps? But then, what if the story was also a time-travel story? Aha, like Outlander, genre moviemakers might say? Sadly no, there’s not enough sex or violence. Plenty of implied violence. After all, the story features Cromwell. And two priests who escape the Belgian revolution of 1830. But the main gambit of the book is despair. The experience of despair is the ticket that gets people to Inis Caillte, the fourth, lost Aran island. Who wants to make that movie?

My first thought was Anthony Minghella. Let’s face it, he’s about as likely as anybody. He would have done beautifully with it. The man who could make the poet’s book that is The English Patient into a movie —a feat that I seriously doubted was possible — would be the dream director for a book like this. The whole thing is about texture and mental experience, and about coming out the other end of deadly suffering. Into what? A bit more life, perhaps, in a low-key sort of place, a small island with no government and no God. Come to think of it, another director who would have affinity for this story would be...[read on]

Visit Sarah Tolmie's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Fourth Island.

My Book, The Movie: The Fourth Island.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight epic quest stories

Micheline Aharonian Marcom is the author of seven novels, including a trilogy of books about the Armenian genocide and its aftermath in the 20th century.

Her latest book is The New American.

At Electric Lit she tagged eight epic journeys in literature, including:

Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston

When I think of Hurston I recall her description in her essay “How It Feels to Be Colored Me” of the “cosmic Zora” who would emerge at times as she walked down Seventh Avenue, her hat set at a certain angle, who belonged “to no race nor time. I am the eternal feminine with its string of beads.” In Hurston’s extraordinary novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, the eternal and timeless qualities of imaginative literature are on full display in the very specific groundings of place and time, spoken language and culture. The book opens with Janie Crawford recounting her life story to her friend Pheoby upon her return to the all-Black town of Eatonville, Florida. The book, set in the 1930s, follows Janie’s narration of her early life, her three marriages (the last for love), and the many trials she undergoes including the death of her beloved during her travels, before she finally returns changed, wiser, independent. “You got tuh go there tuh know there…Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”

Read about another entry on the list.

Their Eyes Were Watching God also appears among Michael Zapata's ten books that were almost lost to history, Yann Martel's five favorite books, and Benjamin Obler's top ten fictional coffee scenes in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Philip C. Almond's "The Antichrist: A New Biography"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Antichrist: A New Biography by Philip C. Almond.

About the book, from the publisher:

The malign figure of the Antichrist endures in modern culture, whether religious or secular; and the spectral shadow he has cast over the ages continues to exert a strong and powerful fascination. Philip C. Almond tells the story of the son of Satan from his early beginnings to the present day, and explores this false Messiah in theology, literature and the history of ideas. Discussing the origins of the malevolent being who at different times was cursed as Belial, Nero or Damien, the author reveals how Christianity in both East and West has imagined this incarnation of absolute evil destined to appear at the end of time. For the better part of the last two thousand years, Almond suggests, the human battle between right and wrong has been envisaged as a mighty cosmic duel between good and its opposite, culminating in an epic final showdown between Christ and his deadly arch-nemesis.

Learn more about The Antichrist at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: Afterlife: A History of Life after Death.

The Page 99 Test: The Antichrist: A New Biography.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Yoon Ha Lee

From my Q&A with Yoon Ha Lee, author of Phoenix Extravagant:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I've always thought a title should intrigue the reader and, if possible, just sound cool. It might be weird to have a story about a mecha dragon (featured on the cover!) called Phoenix Extravagant, but that was the title that came to me when I conceived this novel. It refers to a magical paint pigment with fiery and destructive power, and I picked the phoenix reference because it's based on a real-world watercolor pigment, PO49 (Quinacridone Gold), that has a glowing golden tone. The secret behind the creation of these magical pigments is at the heart of the story's exploration of themes of colonialism and assimilation.

What's in a name?

My setting, Hwaguk, is loosely based on…[read on]

Visit Yoon Ha Lee's website.

The Page 69 Test: Revenant Gun.

Writers Read: Yoon Ha Lee (June 2018).

My Book, The Movie: Ninefox Gambit.

Q&A with Yoon Ha Lee.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books featuring unlikely detectives

Peter Colt was born in Boston, MA in 1973 and moved to Nantucket Island shortly thereafter. He is a 1996 graduate of the University of Rhode Island and a 24-year veteran of the Army Reserve with deployments to Kosovo and Iraq. He is a police officer in a New England City and the married father of two boys.

Colt's new novel is Back Bay Blues.

[My Book, The Movie: Back Bay Blues; The Page 69 Test: Back Bay Blues; Q&A with Peter Colt]

At CrimeReads, Colt tagged eight novels featuring "amateur sleuths [who] never asked to get mixed up in a murder investigation—but they won't stop looking until they find the truth," including:

Walter Mosley, Devil in a Blue Dress

This is the one that started this whole train of thought. I was working on one of my novels with its very conventional detective and all I could think of was Easy Rawlins. As my guy is getting ready to go out looking for a missing teen, I was wondering if Easy were in the same situation, would he rather be at home with a drink, listening to a fight on the radio? After all, Easy never wanted to be a detective, it was thrust on him.

Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins is a World War II veteran who is originally from Houston. He is laid off from his job as a defense contractor and ends up drinking in another Houstonian’s bar. While there, he is hired by a white man to find a white woman named Daphne Monet who frequents black jazz clubs. It doesn’t take long for bodies to appear, putting Rawlins into it up to his neck. Like all the best mysteries, this one has the potent combination of murder and blackmail.

Easy Rawlins is an Unlikely Detective because it is the last thing he wants to do. He would much rather have his job at the defense plant, to make his mortgage payments and live the American dream. The problem is that in 1940s Los Angeles, that dream is harder to realize for some more than others. Rawlins is black, the racism of the 1940s is pervasive and Rawlins quickly runs out of options to save his bit of the American Dream. Once he reluctantly becomes a detective and is thrust deeper into the case, racism becomes even more acute when he is dealing with the police. Racism is a constant backbeat, the bass notes to the story. It is always there, but it isn’t the whole story. Walter Mosley does a brilliant job of using fiction to address racism and by driving the plot with it. He also tells us a great detective story about a guy who just wants to be an average Joe and ends up an Unlikely Detective.

Read about another entry on the list.

Devil in a Blue Dress is among E.G. Scott's ten best pairs of frenemies in fiction, Alex Segura's nine top jazz-infused crime novels, Lori Roy's five top morality-driven thrillers, and Al Roker's six favorite crime novels.

Raymond “Mouse” Alexander, from Mosley’s Easy Rawlins series, made The A.V. Club's list of “13 sidekicks who are cooler than their heroes.”

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Elaine Farrell's "Women, Crime and Punishment in Ireland"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Women, Crime and Punishment in Ireland: Life in the Nineteenth-Century Convict Prison by Elaine Farrell.

About the book, from the publisher:

Focusing on women's relationships, decisions and agency, this is the first study of women's experiences in a nineteenth-century Irish prison for serious offenders. Showcasing the various crimes for which women were incarcerated in the post-Famine period, from repeated theft to murder, Elaine Farrell examines inmate files in close detail in order to understand women's lives before, during and after imprisonment. By privileging case studies and individual narratives, this innovative study reveals imprisoned women's relationships with each other, with the staff employed to manage and control them, and with their relatives, spouses, children and friends who remained on the outside. In doing so, Farrell illuminates the hardships many women experienced, their poverty and survival strategies, as well as their responsibilities, obligations, and decisions. Incorporating women's own voices, gleaned from letters and prison files, this intimate insight into individual women's lives in an Irish prison sheds new light on collective female experiences across urban and rural post-Famine Ireland.

Visit Elaine Farrell's website.

The Page 99 Test: Women, Crime and Punishment in Ireland.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Bennett R. Coles's "Dark Star Rising"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: Dark Star Rising: Blackwood & Virtue by Bennett R. Coles.

About the book, from the publisher:

The misfit crew of HMSS Daring are on a covert mission to dismantle a sprawling pirate network threatening the empire in this enthralling second Blackwood & Virtue novel—a thrilling, action-packed blend of the military sea adventures of Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander series with Jim Butcher’s sci fi Cinder Spires novels.

Exuberant after scoring a major victory against enemy pirates, the star sailing ship HMSS Daring eagerly embarks on its new mission. Until the pirate network is dismantled and its mysterious leader Dark Star brought to justice, the safety of the empire remains in jeopardy.

Supported by the ship’s misfit crew, Subcommander Liam Blackwood and Quartermaster Amelia Virtue go undercover, following leads that take them deep into the pirate network. Yet the closer they get to its center and the elusive Dark Star, the clearer it becomes that all is not what it seems.

Pirates aren’t the only danger the duo face. Empowered by imperial decree, an old enemy is murdering noble families and taking their property—an enemy that has a personal grudge against Daring and her crew. And now he is on his way across the galaxy to exact revenge.

Caught between ruthless pirates, a vengeful enemy, and their own increasingly intense feelings, Liam and Amelia must use all their cunning, charm, and daring to get out this alive.

Visit Bennett R. Coles's website.

The Page 69 Test: Dark Star Rising.

--Marshal Zeringue

Eight books about the intersection of witchcraft & feminism

Lucile Scott is a Brooklyn-based writer and editor. She has reported on national and international health and human rights issues for over a decade. Most recently, she has worked at the United Nations and amfAR, the Foundation for AIDS Research, and has contributed to such publications as VICE and POZ magazines. In addition, she has written and/or directed plays that have been featured in New York City, Edinburgh, and Los Angeles. In 2016 she hit the rails as part of Amtrak’s writers’ residency program. An American Covenant: A Story of Women, Mysticism, and the Making of Modern America is her first book.

At Electric Lit, Scott tagged eight books about hexing the patriarchy, including:

The Illness Lesson by Clare Beams

In the late 1800s, the American male medical establishment coined the term “mediomania,” in an effort to link insanity to Spiritualism, and cut down the threat to the patriarchal order. They then redefined insanity’s symptoms as the most common side effects of entrancement—rigidity, seizure, ecstasy. Eventually, they settled on the more widely employed “hysteria,” derived from the Greek hystera, meaning uterus.

Beams riveting slow burn of a novel tells a story of “teenage hysteria” set in 1871 in New England. The prose is so thick with mystic symbols and smoldering repression that it reads like a startlingly lucid dream or nightmare—one that explores how, even when well meaning, the male medical and philosophical establishments can hex a woman by convincing her that her flawed, weak body, not the strict limits society puts on her, are responsible for her ills. It also poignantly expresses the power of pulling back that curtain and seeing the truth: you are strong.

Read about another entry on the list.

The Page 69 Test: The Illness Lesson.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: David Komline's "The Common School Awakening"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Common School Awakening: Religion and the Transatlantic Roots of American Public Education by David Komline.

About the book, from the publisher:

A statue of Horace Mann, erected in front of the Boston State House in 1863, declares him the "Father of the American Public School System." For over a century and a half, most narratives about early American education have taken this epithet as the truth. As Mann looms over the Boston Common, so he has also loomed over discussions of early American schooling. Other scholarship has emphasized economic factors as the main reason for the emergence of public schools. The Common School Awakening offers a new narrative about the rise of public schools in America that counters these conceptions.

In this book, David Komline explains how a broad and distinctly American religious consensus emerged in the first half of the nineteenth century, allowing people from across the religious spectrum to cooperate in systematizing and professionalizing America's schools in an effort to Christianize the country. At the height of this movement, several states introduced state-sponsored teacher training colleges and concentrated government oversight of schools in offices such as the one held by Mann. Shortly thereafter, the religious consensus that had served as the foundation for this common school system disintegrated. But the system itself remained, the legacy of not just one man, but of a whole network of reformers who put into motion a transatlantic and transdenominational religious movement - the "Common School Awakening."

Learn more about The Common School Awakening at the Oxford University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Common School Awakening.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Christopher Cosmos

From my Q&A with Christopher Cosmos, author of Once We Were Here: A Novel:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

I love titles, and think that they are and can be extremely important, and I think of titles as the first opportunity to introduce readers to what they're about to dive into. I also think that the best titles add something imperative to the story. An example I often think about is the movie You Can Count On Me. In the movie, Laura Linney and Mark Ruffalo play siblings, and towards the end, in a very emotional scene, he asks her something along the lines of, "Do you remember when we were kids, do you remember what we used to say to each other?" And she responds, through her tears, "Of course I do!" They don't have to say it to each other again, because that's not how people talk, but we already know what it is that they used to say to each other, because...[read on]

Visit Christopher Cosmos's website.

The Page 69 Test: Once We Were Here.

Q&A with Christopher Cosmos.

--Marshal Zeringue

Seven great thrillers that take readers to faraway places

Rose Carlyle is a law professor who has written intermittently throughout her life and who began writing fiction in 2016. She was awarded first class honours in her creative writing Masters at the University of Auckland and was granted a prestigious mentorship under which she developed and completed this manuscript. She spends her spare time in far-flung places and currently lives in New Zealand. The Girl in the Mirror is her debut novel.

At CrimeReads, Carlyle tagged seven "books that have transported me to places I’ve never been with such vividness that I feel as though I have." One title on the list:

All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld

UK-based Wyld leaps from one end of the world to the other with every chapter of this tightly plotted novel. The story alternates between the present day on a stormy English island and past events that occurred under the blazing sun of a Queensland sheep station. Wyld breaks most of the crime fiction “rules,” and much of the story is revealed in reverse chronological order. The reader is dizzied but never confused by the contrasts between the English cold and the Australian heat, but what the two landscapes have in common is a rawness that offers no safe harbor to the brooding, secretive heroine.

Read about another entry on the list.

All the Birds, Singing is among four books that changed Alison Booth and Cal Flyn's ten top books about the Australian bush.

My Book, The Movie: All the Birds, Singing.

--Marshal Zeringue

Anna Ellory's "The Puzzle Women," the movie

Featured at My Book, The Movie: The Puzzle Women by Anna Ellory.

The entry begins:

If they make my book into a movie (which would be amazing as I see the whole scene before I place a word on the page so I can already see it) here’s who I’d like to play the lead roles.

Lotte – a young actress with Down Syndrome there are so few actresses with Down syndrome, I believe this should change, a younger Sarah Gordy (who is exceptional) – someone who can capture the joy and happiness Lotte exudes even in her darkest moments.

Rune – A 20 something guy, tall and handsome in a quirky way, very insecure. I love Manchester by the Sea (one of my favourite films) and...[read on]

Visit Anna Ellory's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Puzzle Women.

My Book, The Movie: The Puzzle Women.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Richard Gaskins's "The Congo Trials in the International Criminal Court"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: The Congo Trials in the International Criminal Court by Richard Gaskins.

About the book, from the publisher:

This is the first in-depth study of the first three ICC trials: an engaging, accessible text meant for specialists and students, for legal advocates and a wide range of professionals concerned with diverse cultures, human rights, and restorative justice. It introduces international justice and courtroom trials in practical terms, offering a balanced view on persistent tensions and controversies. Separate chapters analyze the working realities of central African armed conflicts, finding reasons for their surprising resistance to ICC legal formulas. The book dissects the Court's structural dynamics, which were designed to steer an elusive middle course between high moral ideals and hard political realities. Detailed chapters provide vivid accounts of courtroom encounters with four Congolese suspects. The mixed record of convictions, acquittals, dissents, and appeals, resulting from these trials, provides a map of distinct fault-lines within the ICC legal code, and suggests a rocky path ahead for the Court's next ventures.

Learn more about The Congo Trials in the International Criminal Court at the Cambridge University Press website.

The Page 99 Test: The Congo Trials in the International Criminal Court.

--Marshal Zeringue

Q&A with Robert Masello

From my Q&A with Robert Masello, author of The Haunting of H. G. Wells:

How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?

For once, I got a title that works well with the book. (Picking titles is my nightmare.) The hero of the book is, of course, H.G. Wells, arguably the founder of sci-fi, and the author of such classics as The Time Machine, The Invisible Man, and The War of the Worlds. The book is set during the First World War, and Wells is sent to the Western Front, by Winston Churchill no less, to investigate rumors of a brigade of angels descending from Heaven to repel the German troops. Such a story actually did make its way into the public consciousness. While at the Front, Wells is drawn into a world that even he could not have imagined, a world whose denizens...[read on]

Learn more about the book and author at Robert Masello's website.

The Page 69 Test: Blood and Ice.

The Page 69 Test: The Medusa Amulet.

The Page 69 Test: The Einstein Prophecy.

My Book, The Movie: The Einstein Prophecy.

The Page 69 Test: The Night Crossing.

Q&A with Robert Masello.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 69: Sarah Tolmie's "The Fourth Island"

Featured at the Page 69 Test: The Fourth Island by Sarah Tolmie.

About the book, from the publisher:

Dark, mournful, and beautiful, Sarah Tolmie's The Fourth Island is a moving and unforgettable story of life and death on the hidden Irish island of Inis Caillte.

Huddled in the sea off the coast of Ireland is a fourth Aran Island, a secret island peopled by the lost, findable only in moments of despair. Whether drowned at sea, trampled by Cromwell's soldiers, or exiled for clinging to the dead, no outsiders reach the island without giving in to dark emotion.

Time and again, The Fourth Island weaves a hypnotic pattern with its prose, presaging doom before walking back through the sweet and sour moments of lives not yet lost. It beautifully melds the certainty of loss with the joys of living, drawing readers under like the tide.

Visit Sarah Tolmie's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Fourth Island.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ten top books about the Himalayas

Ed Douglas is an award-winning writer with a passion for the Himalaya. The author of a dozen books, including a biography of Tenzing Norgay, he has reported from the region for more than twenty-five years, covering the Maoist insurgency in Nepal and the Tibetan occupation. He lives in Yorkshire, England.

Douglas's new book is Himalaya: A Human History.

At the Guardian, he tagged ten "books that catch the human texture and shape of the world’s highest mountain range," including:

Kathmandu by Thomas Bell

Tom Bell went to Kathmandu as an eager young foreign correspondent, reporting for the Daily Telegraph on the Nepali civil war that began in 1996. Then he fell in love, with his future wife and also with the city. Bell wasn’t the first outsider to be beguiled, but none have written about the Himalayas’ greatest city so well. Kathmandu is as rich a literary hunting ground as Istanbul, but unlike the Byzantines, the ancient Newari culture that built the Kathmandu valley’s lilliputian city-states has survived, even as the city has swollen and evolved. Bell is a subtle guide through this tantric, down-at-heel labyrinth, teasing apart the layers.

Read about another book on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pg. 99: Michelle Jackson's "Manifesto for a Dream"

Featured at the Page 99 Test: Manifesto for a Dream: Inequality, Constraint, and Radical Reform by Michelle Jackson.

About the book, from the publisher:

A searing critique of our contemporary policy agenda, and a call to implement radical change.

Although it is well known that the United States has an inequality problem, the social science community has failed to mobilize in response. Social scientists have instead adopted a strikingly insipid approach to policy reform, an ostensibly science-based approach that offers incremental, narrow-gauge, and evidence-informed "interventions." This approach assumes that the best that we can do is to contain the problem. It is largely taken for granted that we will never solve it. In Manifesto for a Dream, Michelle Jackson asserts that we will never make strides toward equality if we do not start to think radically. It is the structure of social institutions that generates and maintains social inequality, and it is only by attacking that structure that progress can be made. Jackson makes a scientific case for large-scale institutional reform, drawing on examples from other countries to demonstrate that reforms that have been unthinkable in the United States are considered to be quite unproblematic in other contexts. She persuasively argues that an emboldened social science has an obligation to develop and test the radical policies that would be necessary for equality to be assured for all.

Visit Michelle Jackson's website.

The Page 99 Test: Manifesto for a Dream.

--Marshal Zeringue

Five thrillers that explore "mean girl" culture

Avery Bishop is the pseudonym for a USA Today bestselling author of over a dozen novels, including the newly released Girl Gone Mad.

[The Page 69 Test: Girl Gone Mad; Q&A with Avery Bishop.]

At CrimeReads, Bishop tagged "five novels that, while they may not mainly focus on mean girl culture, certainly contain aspects that are important to the plot; in some of the books, bullying is what sets the story in motion." One title on the list:

Good Girls Lie by J.T. Ellison

Ellison’s novel takes place at an exclusive girls’ boarding school, which is pretty much the perfect setting for mean girl culture. Ash, the protagonist, comes to the school from the United Kingdom after the death of her parents, and right off the bat—like within minutes of her arriving on campus—some of the girls start messing with her. As you can imagine, things spiral out of control from there.

Read about another entry on the list.

My Book, The Movie: Good Girls Lie.

The Page 69 Test: Good Girls Lie.

--Marshal Zeringue