He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his latest novel, The Abduction, and reported the following:
In a way, the Page 99 Test does hold true with The Abduction because page 99 is a turning point in the story.Read an excerpt from The Abduction.
The central theme of the novel is the theory of life: Are the events of our lives just a series of random coincidences without purpose, plan, or connection? Or, are the events of our lives connected, purposeful, and pursuant to a plan; that is, are they steps along our journey that prepare us for what is yet to come? A Ph.D. friend of mine believes in the chaos theory; my mother, a devout Catholic, believes in the plan theory. And so did the mother of Ben Brice, the main character in The Abduction. In 1964 when he was eighteen and boarding a train in West Texas bound for West Point, his mother told him that "God has a plan for Ben Brice." And Ben believed her, right up until that dark night in 1968 in the Quang Tri province of South Vietnam and a massacre he could not stop and a child he could not save.
Now, thirty-years years later, Ben lives alone in a remote cabin in New Mexico, estranged from his family; he builds wood furniture by hand during the day and drinks himself to sleep each night; and he wonders what God's plan had been and why it had gone so wrong. The only light of his life is his ten-year-old granddaughter, Gracie, who lives outside Dallas. They share a bond he neither questions nor understands -- until she is abducted after her soccer game.
Ben is sure his dark past has come back to haunt her.
On page 99, FBI Special Agent Eugene Devereaux is holding a press conference to ask for the public's help in finding Gracie. We learn that the FBI's investigation has come up empty; they have no leads. Gracie simply disappeared. But Ben knows otherwise. The pieces of his life that never seemed to fit together are starting to fall into place like a complex puzzle to reveal the whole life that he will soon understand. And he will soon realize that his mother had been right all along.
Visit the official website for the novel and Mark Gimenez's website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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