Cody Mcfadyen's "The Face of Death"

Cody Mcfadyen is the author of Shadow Man and The Face of Death.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to the latter and reported the following:

In my opinion, Ford Madox Ford's statement is an interesting idea, but maybe mostly because it's so unlikely. I took a whirl at it and read Page 99 of my new novel, The Face of Death. It was a decent enough page, a part of the book designed to fill in some gaps and keep the story humming along. But I wouldn't send it out as an ambassador of the book. A novel is an organism symbiotic with itself. The beginning feeds the middle feeds the end. Then the middle chews on the beginning a little bit while the end cleans barnacles off both of them. My point being, you read a book until it's done, and only then can you really know what the "quality of the whole" is. Even so, that favored bugbear appears - subjectivity. Some people read a book and hate it, some read a book and love it. In my humble opinion, you should start at page one and eat the whole sundae, fudge and all. Reading is a meal, not a taste test.

Read more about The Face of Death --including an excerpt -- at Mcfadyen's website.

--Marshal Zeringue