Charles Barber's "Comfortably Numb"

Charles Barber was educated at Harvard and Columbia and worked for ten years in New York City shelters for the homeless mentally ill. The title essay of his first book, Songs from the Black Chair, won a 2006 Pushcart Prize. His work has appeared in the New York Times and Scientific American Mind, among other publications, and on NPR. He is a senior administrator at The Connection, an innovative social services agency, and a lecturer in psychiatry at the Yale University School of Medicine.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation, and reported the following:

Here is the entirety of page 99. As it happens, it is a short page, perhaps the shortest page in the book, as it ends a chapter.

The text:

What does this say about us? What does it say about how we, as a culture, live now and how we choose to solve problems? What does it say about how we view our emotions? Why does it say about our psyches, and our souls? In other words, why did it happen?

I suspect the answer has something to do with misery.

The "it" I am referring to is the astonishing rate of usage of antidepressant prescriptions in the U.S. In 2007, more than 230 millions prescriptions were written, more than any other class of medication.

And the last sentence -- "something to do with misery" -- leads to the next chapter, "American Misery," which is about social dislocation and disconnection in contemporary America.

So p. 99 is not exactly representative of my book -- it is more of a bridging device.

But I like my page 99, and am happy that it is my book's representative in this little exercise. I like to think that there is something soothingly modest and a little refreshing about a page that is largely involved with exploratory questions, and then merely suggests an answer to those questions. In other words: this is all for your consideration.

For me, the best books raise and explore issues, but don't settle them.

Read an excerpt from Comfortably Numb, and learn more about the book and author at Charles Barber's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Ed Lynskey's "Pelham Fell Here"

Ed Lynskey is the author of Pelham Fell Here, The Dirt-Brown Derby, The Dirt-Brown Derby, Out of Town a Few Days, and A Clear Path To Cross (all detective mysteries). His work has also appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Washington Post, and New York Times.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest novel, Pelham Fell Here, and reported the following:

From Page 99:

Chapter 21

He’d overshot the farmhouse driveway. I screeched, waved, and fumbled in my small steps down the driveway. The woods at the landfill from which I was supposed to emerge attracted Chet’s attention. Frantic, I pumped the sawed-off and reeled off three salvos, but hurting too much I couldn’t manage a fourth.

My aggressive stunt did the trick. I saw no K-9 dogs, but Chet’s brake lights flared on. The Barracuda notched a U-turn to fly back and scream up the driveway. I flipped out the Barracuda’s door and eased my bones down into the black velour upholstery. I shut the car door. The wiry, short Chet toed the gas and shot me a glance.

“Does the other dude look as bad?”

I took a moment to quiet my tremors. “I just got my bell rung. Was anybody else on the road?”

“Just some fool in an orange car. Is that a rat? My dad won’t like rat shit soiling these new seat covers.”

“Mr. Bojangles is a ferret.”

“What are you doing with a ferret, Frank?”

“I found him at the farmhouse. He’s the only good thing in there.”

“Okay, but where were you?”

“I was right here. Mr. Van Dotson was supposed to tell you we’d meet at the old landfill.”

“He did. He also said you tore off. What’s up, dawg?”

Ford Madox Ford, a contemporary of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle creating the great detective Sherlock Holmes, may’ve been on to something about page 99 in a novel. Page 99 in my newest P.I. Frank Johnson mystery, Pelham Fell Here, finds Frank, a little battered and bruised, having just escaped from a jam. He’s linked up with his trusty, young sidekick, Chet Peyton, and they’re beginning to map out what next moves to take.

This opening scene in Chapter 21 strikes me as a pivotal one where Frank’s quest has been pretty much set. He’s gotten his reinforcements in Chet, and their chase is now joined after the bad guys, a neo-Nazi sect he’s managed to antagonize. It’s a duel to the death.

One further detail arises on page 99. Mr. Bojangles, the ferret Frank has rescued from the neo-Nazis, offers a bit of comedic relief. Well, he’s supposed to lighten up the mood in an otherwise dark chronicle. I went back and forth on whether to include a pet. In the final manuscript’s shakedown, Mr. Bojangles was a keeper. Frank deserved the pet to help keep his sanity and humanity intact.

Frank isn’t yet committed to working as a private detective (this is really the first book in the series). On page 99, he’s taking the steps to investigate the murder of his cousin Cody Chapman if only because Frank is made the prime suspect. He has to prove his innocence before he’s arrested.

Read an excerpt from Pelham Fell Here, and learn more about the book and author at the publisher's website.

Ed Lynskey's The Blue Cheer, the movie.

The Page 69 Test: The Dirt-Brown Derby.

--Marshal Zeringue

Iain Gately's "Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol"

Iain Gately's books include Tobacco: A Cultural History of How an Exotic Plant Seduced Civilization. Raised in Hong Kong, he studied law at Cambridge University and worked in the financial markets of London.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Drink: A Cultural History of Alcohol, and reported that "by happy co-incidence p 99 of Drink is indicative of the style and content of the rest of the book."

The text for p 99 is set out below. The page begins with an illustration from the codex Mendoza with the caption "An Aztec Matron enjoys the milk of old age."

quantities of pulque. The results, according to a Spanish source, were ugly: “Once drunk, they would quarrel among themselves, they cuffed one another and fell on the fl oor on top of each other, or else they would go embracing each other.”

In addition to the aforementioned exceptions, some people were cursed by the stars to drink. Rabbit served as an astrological marker—it was one of the signs of the Aztec zodiac, and anyone born on the day of Umetochtli—2- Rabbit—was destined to become a drunk, who “would not look for anything else in life save alcohol . . . and only drink it . . . in order to get intoxicated . . . even before breakfast”. Two- Rabbits were easy to spot, as they were notoriously unkempt: “They totter along, falling down and getting full of dust, and red in the face. . . . They do not care, although they may be covered in bruises and wounds from falls, provided they can get drunk, nothing else matters.” Interestingly, the Aztec legal process was unusually sympathetic toward them. Their drunkenness was a valid alibi for any crime. “He has become his rabbit” would be the judgment, and punishment would be left to fate. The defense of possession by one’s rabbit was proof against every charge, though at the price of stigma—people born on luckier days had nothing but “loathing and hatred” for 2- Rabbits.

The Spanish did their best to exterminate Aztec and other New World religious practices and to replace them with Christianity. All the traditional drinking occasions were prohibited, as were the intricate laws governing who might drink and when. This cultural apocalypse resulted in an increase in tippling among their new subjects, to whom it became a secular, as opposed to ritual, pastime.

Read more about Drink at the publisher's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

John Darnton's "Black and White and Dead All Over"

John Darnton has worked for forty years as a reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He was awarded two George Polk Awards for his coverage of Africa and Eastern Europe, and the Pulitzer Prize for his stories that were smuggled out of Poland during the period of martial law. A best-selling author, his novels include Neanderthal and The Darwin Conspiracy.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new novel, Black and White and Dead All Over, and reported the following:

Page 99 of Black and White and Dead All Over, which is a satire about today's newspaper business set in the guise of a murder mystery, presents background about a single character. He's a minor character who plays only a minor role in the plot, but he does represent something larger. He's an old-time newspaper columnist, a shoe-leather man, who smokes, drinks, remembers riding in police cars with Walter Winchell and is about to get sacked -- in other words, the last of a dying breed. He grew up poor in Hell's Kitchen, drifted into newspapering by accident and stuck with it because it gave him a living and he was good at it. That, in essence, is the book's entire view of the profession today: the great golden days are over -- that is, the days before the Web stole the ads, the Ivy League became a recruiting ground, reporters became journalists, food critics became celebrities and editors buckled under to business pressures. I admit, it's a view tainted by romance, but journalism, to those who engage in it, has always been this remarkable balancing act between cynicism and optimism.

Read an excerpt from the novel, and learn more about the author and his work at John Darnton's website and his blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Pat Willard's "America Eats!"

Pat Willard's books about food include: Pie Every Day, sited by Atlantic Monthly, Bon Appetit, and Amazon.com, as among the top ten cookbooks of 1997; A Soothing Broth (1999), about old recipes to feed the sick; and Secrets of Saffron, nominated as "Best Literary Cookbook in 2002" by the International Association of Culinary Professionals.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, America Eats!: On the Road with the WPA-The Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials, and Chitlin' Feasts that Define Real American Food, and reported the following:

America’s culinary history is used to getting no respect. We think of ourselves too often as a nation of deep-fry-loving idiots, too used to fast-food and processed ingredients to know–let alone care–about the finer points of cooking and eating.

Thank God, then, for America Eats!, the manuscript written for the Federal Writers’ Project by out-of-work writers (some of whom, such as Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Ralph Ellison, and Nelson Algren would go on to greatness), during the Great Depression. Beginning in 1935, the writers produced such famous works as state travel guides and oral histories of former slaves and general laborers–from stone cutters to circus dancers.

In the later years, they were asked to produce “an account of group eating as an important American social institution; its part in development of American cookery as an authentic art.” It was to be called America Eats!, that final exclamation point a critical cue for the exuberance the subject was intended to arouse.

The manuscript, however, was never printed. Congress cut the Project’s funding in 1943. State offices were told to box up writers notes, research and unfinished manuscripts–including all of America Eats!, which had been in the final editing stages–and send them off to the Library of Congress.

My book, America Eats! On the Road with the WPA: The Fish Fries, Box Supper Socials and Chitlin’ Feasts that Define Real American Food, dusts off the original manuscript to explore our culinary roots and to use as a guide to discover how we eat and think about food today.

Page 99 finds us on the second page of the chapter “Political Gatherings”–what were once considered great occasions to barbecue. It starts with the ending of the FWP’s story about Bluebill, a barbecue God, and the beginning of my own reporting:

his sauce and mop. And, as the brown hunks of meat approach perfection, Bluebill grows as proud as a monkey with a tin tail. As the main speaker booms forth, his sonorous voice damning taxes and the Republican party, the fourteen hours of preparations come to an end, and the attention hitherto given the candidate is divided between him and eating. While the speaker is describing his opponent as a “shallow-brained, slack-jawed liar, a bull ape of Mississippi politics, a big baboon cavorting like a fat pony on high cats,” teeth are already sinking into fresh bread, thick slices of beef, and Bluebill’s incomparable sauce, the ladies are seeking glasses of lemonade from Uncle Si Curtis’ stand, and the men are passing out the corn liquor.

Speeches over, the speakers move over to the table themselves, and the crowd makes way a little, but just a little. Dead enemies, who were a moment ago blackening each other for all eternity on the platform, meet, help each other to the delectable, tantalizing beef, the bread, and the potato salad, sample each others’ whiskey and chat as if food and drink have eradicated all differences–at least for the moment.

–Mississippi Office

It is close to noon and as the day heats up, blistering the swampy land to a dry scab, the two sisters take a break from shelling beans to listen to the politicians swirling around the pavilion in Founders Square at the Neshoba County Fair. Whether it’s an election year or not, if you want to be within fifty feet of a politician and hear a political speech, then the Neshoba County Fair is where you end up traveling to. The Square is packed–almost standing-room only–with people who have come down for the day to listen to the political speeches, and with those who live in rows of wooden cabins or in trailers on the fairgrounds for the week. The sisters have been attending the Fair since 1936 when Marie, the oldest sister at 93, was a bride. She proudly points back across the Square to what looks like nothing more than a two-story shack leaning in a line beside other shacks.

“That’s Dr. Jay Stribling’s cabin,” she says, speaking proudly of her husband’s father, both men long dead. Marie turns back and looks around the Square, trying to recall how many speeches she’s listened to over the years.

“My mind’s not as sharp as it used to be,” she smiles and shakes her head a little indifferently, brushing a white curl away from her forehead. She turns to her sister for help. “How many do you consider, Cecilia?”

Read an excerpt from America Eats!, and learn more about the author and her work at Pat Willard's website and her blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

Howard Jones' "The Bay of Pigs"

Howard Jones is University Research Professor of History at the University of Alabama. His books include Mutiny on the Amistad and Death of a Generation.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Bay of Pigs, and reported the following:

On April 17, 1961, a small band of 1500 Cuban exiles invaded their former homeland at the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow Fidel Castro. The amphibious operation had been the brainchild of the CIA, which had assumed an aura of invincibility after its covert successes in Iran and Guatemala. The agency had planned the entire operation—a path-breaking venture that hinged on covert action, a preemptive strike, and, incredibly, an arrangement with the Mafia to assassinate Castro and set off a popular insurrection. In approving the invasion, the Kennedy administration had taken a new direction in foreign policy, one that rested on assassination and military force.

The landing, as is well known, was a spectacular failure. Castro not only survived the invasion but outlasted ten presidents despite every effort to force him from office—including at least six attempts at assassination.

This fiasco—a word that has become synonymous with Bay of Pigs—provided ample warning of the unpredictable dangers inherent in an interventionist foreign policy. Yet the warning remains unheeded—as shown in Vietnam and Iraq.

When I applied the “Page 99 Test” to my work, I was amazed at how much that excerpt revealed about the Cuban operation. Despite President Kennedy’s stipulations, the first invaders to hit the Cuban beaches were Americans. The CIA ignored his directive, believing that only Americans could do the job right and that military considerations must have priority over White House concerns regarding plausible deniability. So sure of itself, the agency had gone beyond its expertise in covert action to engineer a military operation that, by all measures, belonged to the Joint Chiefs of Staff but seemed certain of success because of its belief that the White House would resort to U.S. military intervention if necessary. The initial events on the Cuban beaches highlighted on this page starkly exposed the deficiencies in the CIA’s intelligence gathering apparatus that suggested further flaws in the plan—a chilling portent of the disaster to come:

… Just before midnight preceding the landing, the operation began as two small underwater demolition teams in rubber rafts stealthily motored toward shore, each group—one of five Cubans, the other with three—led by an American and hence in violation of President Kennedy’s directive against U.S. participation. With blackened faces and wearing black outfits and rubber sandals, the larger UDT team headed to Blue Beach, the other to Red Beach, their missions the same: Mark the best channels for the ships’ approach with red and white lights visible only from the sea and turned on when the vessels came within a half mile of shore.

The two Americans were vocal and highly visible. At Blue Beach was Grayston Lynch (known as Gray), a muscular, wide-bodied former member of the Special Forces in Laos who had twice been wounded in World War II, during the Normandy invasion and at the Battle of the Bulge, and again in the Korean War at Heartbreak Ridge. And at Red Beach was William “Rip” Robertson, called by the Cubans “the Alligator” because of his rough and scaly sun-dried skin. A flamboyant and irreverent battle-hardened marine in World War II, he had had paramilitary experience with the CIA in Korea and Guatemala and later became a close friend of Somoza. Both Americans were CIA case officers, Gray on the Blagar and Robertson on the Barbara J.

As Gray’s frogman team eased toward Blue Beach, the men gawked in disbelief at the tall lights beaming onto the beach from Playa Girón. It “was lit up like Coney Island,” Gray sputtered. Didn’t the CIA’s home office assure them that no one inhabited the resort houses? Indeed, the agency had failed to note the construction workers and their families living in Playa Girón while building the new vacation mecca scheduled to open in less than a month—nearly 200 buildings similar to motels in the United States. And of all things, they were having a party that had spilled onto the beach. No turning back now. The team drifted a short distance from the original landing site. From a thousand yards out, Gray scanned the beach with his binoculars, spotting six figures standing outside the buildings and peering toward the water. He quieted his boat’s engine, trying to determine whether they had been seen. Everything remained still and black in the moonless night. …

Learn more about The Bay of Pigs and its author at the Oxford University Press website and Howard Jones' faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Stephen V. Ash's "Firebrand of Liberty"

Stephen V. Ash is a professor of history at the University of Tennessee and the author of several books on the Civil War, including A Year in the South: Four Lives in 1865.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments That Changed the Course of the Civil War, and reported the following:

I’m not sure my new book, Firebrand of Liberty: The Story of Two Black Regiments That Changed the Course of the Civil War, would pass FMF’s page-99 test. That page, while it does mention several major characters, would by itself leave readers pretty much mystified about the book’s subject. Whether the page reveals the “quality” of the book, I leave to readers to decide.

The book is about a small-scale, nearly forgotten, but quite extraordinary Civil War military expedition. In March 1863 two regiments of black Union troops commanded by white officers invaded Florida and seized Jacksonville, deep inside Confederate territory. It was a daring undertaking whose aim was not purely military. It was intended to provoke a slave insurrection that would destroy the Confederacy from within.

For three weeks the expeditionary force waged war in Florida, fending off Confederate counterattacks and liberating slaves. Then, suddenly and inexplicably, it was recalled by higher authorities. Though abruptly terminated and seemingly a failure, the expedition nevertheless had profound consequences. Apprised of the two regiments’ accomplishments in Florida, President Lincoln decided to go forward with full-scale recruitment of black troops (up to this point, the use of such troops was a very limited and controversial experiment). Ultimately some 180,000 black troops served, giving the Union a crucial manpower edge that helped it win the war.

This story has a fascinating cast of characters, as I discovered doing research. Not all were soldiers, and not all were men. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the expedition’s commander, had before the war been an ally of the fanatical abolitionist John Brown; he envisioned this expedition as a chance to redeem Brown’s failure to stir up a slave rebellion at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, four years earlier. Prince Rivers, a former slave, was Higginson’s most trusted sergeant, a man with a brilliant though untutored military mind. U.S. Treasury agent Lyman Stickney was a liar and con man who accompanied the expedition in the hope of lining his pockets. Charlotte Forten, a cultured young black woman from the North, came south to educate the freed slaves and became involved in a passionate affair with the expedition’s surgeon, who was white, married, and old enough to be her father.

Learn more about Firebrand of Liberty and its author at the W.W. Norton website and Stephen V. Ash's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Lisa Chamberlain's "Slackonomics"

Lisa Chamberlain is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the executive director of the Forum for Urban Design. Her writing has also appeared in Salon, New York magazine, and the New York Observer. Previously, she was the editor-in-chief of a Village Voice-owned weekly paper.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Slackonomics: Generation X in the Age of Creative Destruction, and reported the following:

Slackonomics shows how technological innovation and globalization have radically changed everyday life for Generation X -- from how we work, where we live, how we play, and when we marry and have children, to our attitudes about love, humor, friendship, happiness, and personal fulfillment. Through pop-culture, personal narrative and economics analysis, Slackonomics is about how Generation X has bridged the analog and digital worlds, and learned how to survive and even thrive in this era of financial insecurity and flourishing creativity.

People have asked me how I came up with the idea for Slackonomics (I'm not an economist), and I like to say that the book is essentially a memoir, even though I reveal nothing about my own personal life. And page 99 in fact pretty well reflects this fact (a brilliant concept, btw!). At the age of 34, I moved from Cleveland to New York City to essentially start over. I did this for any number of reasons, but one critical factor was facing down a stagnant job market in Cleveland, where it is easy to hit the career ceiling pretty quickly. What's more, the creative economy -- where Gen X has thrived the most -- is not exactly booming in the Midwest. And yet, uprooting oneself after having invested a lot of time and energy in one place is not easy, and downright scary. Of course, making new friends gets more difficult later in life, but more importantly, friends and social networks have become critical to succeeding in the creative economy, and that's what this section from Slackonomics is about (first graph of page 99):

Even more significant, innovation and cultural production are extremely reliant on the spontaneous sharing of ideas and information in random, unscripted ways. As Elizabeth Currid documents in The Warhol Economy, "Creativity would not exist as a successfully or efficiently without its social world. The social is not the by-product--it is the decisive mechanism by which cultural products and cultural producers are generated, evaluated and sent to the market." As Currid's research shows, people working in technology innovation, arts, music, fashion, design and media are far more likely to live and work in close proximity to each other than people in finance, medicine, law and other "golf course" professions, which are still heavily dependent on the old boys' network method of doing business.

So that is just one of many ways that life has really changed for Generation X as a result of shifting economic circumstances!

Read an excerpt from Slackonomics, and learn more about the book and author at the Slackonomics website.

--Marshal Zeringue

M. Gazzaniga's "Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique"

Michael S. Gazzaniga is the director of the University of California–Santa Barbara's SAGE Center for the Study of the Mind, as well as its Summer Institute in Cognitive Neuroscience. He serves on the President's Council on Bioethics and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies. His publications include The Ethical Brain: The Science of Our Moral Dilemmas.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, and reported the following:

Whether the page 99 test hypothesis would stand up to the scientific method would be a fun problem to tackle, and in the case of my book Human, The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, it would garner support. By definition, a species is unique, and has adapted to different conditions to survive. Adaptive changes that occurred to both the physical body, and how the human brain is hooked up, have allowed Homo sapiens to be both highly sociable and have a unique type of intelligence. Page 99 is from the chapter about social relationships and how our brain, a product of natural selection, is connected to promote social exchange. First there is a quote from the evolutionary psychologist Leda Cosmides making the point that when we understand that the human mind is a product of natural selection that occurred in a hunter-gatherer environment, selected to deal with problems that hunter-gathers faced, we are better able to present modern information to it in formats that are easier to understand:

Let's say you have a positive mammogram. How likely is it that you actually have breast cancer? The typical way of presenting the relevant data - in percents - makes this difficult. If you said that 1% of women randomly screened have breast cancer, and all of these test positive, but there is a 3% false alarm rate, most people mistakenly think a positive mammogram means they have a 97% chance of having breast cancer. But let me give you the same information in absolute frequencies - an ecologically valid information format for a hunter-gatherer mind: Out of every 1000 women, 10 have breast cancer and test positive; 30 test positive but do not have breast cancer. So: out of every 1000 women, 40 will test positive, but only 10 of these will have breast cancer. This format makes it clear that, if you had a positive mammogram, your chance of having breast cancer is only 1 in 4 - that is, 25%, not 97%.

The rest of the page begins Cosmides research on cheater detection in social exchanges. She has found evidence for a specific brain module, or circuit, that allows humans to detect cheaters in social situations, but the same type of problem, if not in a social context format, is much more difficult for people to solve. Here is the example from page 99, and I am going to cheat myself and include part of page 100 to let you see the whole deal.

There are four cards on a table. Each card has a letter on one side and a number on the other. Currently you can see R Q 4 9. Turn over only those cards that you need to, to prove whether the following rule is true or false: If a card has an R on one side, then it has a 4 on the other. Got it? What's your answer? The answer is R and 4. OK, now try this one: There are four people sitting at a table. One is sixteen, the second is 21, the third is drinking coke and the fourth is drinking beer. Only those over 21 can drink beer legally. Who should the bouncer check to make sure the law isn't being broken? That one is easier isn't it? The answer is the 16 year old and the beer drinker.

Reciprocity is the basis of our social structure, but it can't exist if cheaters go undetected. To find out why and learn what other modules we have.... Read on!!!

Read an excerpt from Human: The Science Behind What Makes Us Unique, and learn more about the book and author at the publisher's website and Michael Gazzaniga's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Thomas B. Cavanagh's "Prodigal Son"

Thomas B. Cavanagh is author of the novel Murderland as well as the first Mike Garrity novel, Head Games, which won the Florida Book Awards 2007 Gold Medal for Popular Fiction and was named a 2007 “Killer Book” Selection by the Independent Mystery Bookseller’s Association.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new novel, Prodigal Son, and reported the following:

The conventional wisdom typically offered to writers of commercial fiction is to have a really strong opening ten pages. We are constantly told to “hook” the reader. And it’s certainly true. However, it’s often even more difficult to sustain that level of engagement for another 290 pages.

I have read books (certain copycat techno-thrillers come to mind) where the opening sequence is gripping and establishes a clever and chilling premise. Unfortunately, my interest quickly wanes when the characters are revealed as two-dimensional cutouts with no real authenticity. Perhaps we are willing to accept a little more style than substance to get started, but we need that substance to carry us to the end.

Well-developed characters are the key ingredient to sustaining a narrative for the long haul of an entire novel. Establish interesting and believable characters, give them something they need, and then throw everything you can in their way.

So, when I look at page 99 of my latest crime novel Prodigal Son, I ask myself if I have delivered both style and substance. I certainly hope so. But it isn’t up to me to decide. It’s the reader’s job. I leave it up to you:

“Mike,” said Gary in a calm, even tone. “Why don’t you tell us about your client?”

So I did. I told them about meeting Debbie Watson at the support group. About her leukemia. About her request to find her son so she could meet him before she dies. I left out the sex. I told them about going to the mayor’s office (but I omitted Sally’s role). I told them about talking with Jack O’Malley and then Steven Schumacher. About surprising Debbie and how that had backfired. Then I went through the whole, detailed sequence of the night’s events that led me to this interrogation room.

“You have Debbie Watson’s phone number?” Gary asked.

“It’s in my cell phone. You guys have that. It’s her cell number.” I also described where she lived.

“Okay, Mike,” Gary said, standing. “Give us a few minutes.”

Gary and Joe exited the room, leaving me alone in the bright fluorescent lights. I glanced at my now empty coffee cup and immediately realized that I should have asked to use the men’s room.

* * *

By the time they returned almost thirty minutes later, I was close to having an embarrassing accident in my shorts. They escorted me through the stares of the bullpen to the rest room and then paraded me back through my former colleagues like a big game trophy. They returned me to the room and locked me again to the table.

“So where’s the knife?” Joe said. I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Don’t make this any harder than it has to be, Garrity. Tell us where the knife is.”

“It’s up your ass. With your head,” I said.

Joe pointed his finger at me. “You’re goin’ down.”

“Here’s the thing, Mike,” Gary said. “You have a prior history of asking about the guy. You talked to him on the phone. You’ve been seen lurking around the apartment. Your fingerprints are all over the inside, including on the guy’s wallet. You were found standing in the room with the victim at three-thirty in the morning.”

Prodigal Son is the sequel to the award-winning Head Games and continues the story of curmudgeonly Orlando detective Mike Garrity.

Learn more about the author and his work at Thomas B. Cavanagh's website.

--Marshal Zeringue