Katherine Howell's "The Darkest Hour"

Katherine Howell's first book, Frantic, was released by Pan Macmillan in May 2007 in Australia, with publication slated for 2008/09 in France, Germany, Italy, Russia and the UK.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new novel, The Darkest Hour, and reported the following:

From Page 99:

Ella had to get out of bed again to find the phone book and look up the hospital switch number. They put her through to her mother's room.

'Hi, Mum.'

'Ella! Are you okay?'

'Actually I'm exhausted,' she said, the phone between the pillow and her ear. 'I've been up since yesterday morning.'

'They shouldn't work you so hard.'

'It was my choice to stay, it's a big case.' Ella said, her eyes closed. 'How's your infection?'

'Fine, good, all gone.'

Sure.

'Did you ask about holidays?'

'I can't, Mum, with this case.'

'They don't need everyone on it, do they?'

Ella yawned hugely. She could feel sleep creeping up on her again. 'I'm really sorry but I have to go.'

'Well, if you have to.'

'I'm sorry, Mum. I'll talk to you tomorrow.'

She dropped the phone onto the floor and snuggled deeper under the covers. At last, a big case, I have my big case ...


Joe had the ambulance running when Lauren rushed up minutes before six. She jumped in and slammed the door and Joe accelerated out of the station.

'We're backing up day shift at a burns case in Darlo. Everyone else is tied up.' He roared down George Street. 'Night's going to be shit if the start's any indication.'

Lauren tried to clear her mind. She wouldn't be able to talk to Joe until the job was over. 'Is it a bad one?'

Joe nodded. 'Attempted suicide.' He braked hard as a pedestrian ran across the street in front of them. 'Guy tipped petrol on himself and lit it. He's in an eighth-floor penthouse and the lift's stuffed.'

Lauren took a deep breath. The case would take an hour at least. Then they might have to come back to the station and shower and change. Bad burns left crews smelling like cooked meat, and not in a good way.

So we won't get to talk for a while. Put it to the back of your mind, try not to stew.

As if that was even remotely possible.

Page 99 of The Darkest Hour is a little more than a quarter into the book, and by this point paramedic Lauren Yates is struggling with a bunch of problems. First she found her sister's ex, Thomas Werner, covered in blood beside a murdered man and was threatened into silence, and then she and her colleague Joe fought to save a stabbing victim who told her with his last breaths that Werner attacked him too.

Detective Ella Marconi is thrilled to land this stabbing murder case, and believes Lauren to be the perfect witness because she can testify to the dead man's words.

On this page we see how Ella's also a little stressed by family pressures, and how Lauren is planning to tell Joe that Werner has made new threats. Events conspire to send these plans awry, however, and instead, the following day sees Lauren at the homicide office, begging, to Ella's horror, to take back her statement.

I believe Ford's Page 99 test is applicable here as the pressure is slowly increasing on the characters on this page and the decisions they make while under that pressure lead to further problems. Both these qualities are true of the whole book.

Read an excerpt from The Darkest Hour, and learn more about the author and her work at Katherine Howell's website.

The Page 69 Test: Frantic.

--Marshal Zeringue

Benjamin Wallace's "The Billionaire’s Vinegar"

Benjamin Wallace has written for GQ, Details, Food & Wine, Salon, and the Washington Post. In 2002, the Columbia Journalism Review named him one of “ten young writers on the rise.”

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, The Billionaire’s Vinegar: The Mystery of the World's Most Expensive Bottle of Wine, and reported the following:

The Billionaire’s Vinegar tells the true story of the longest-running mystery in the modern wine world: the origin of a famous cache of extremely rare wine known as the Jefferson bottles. Supposedly discovered in a bricked-up cellar in Paris in the mid-1980s, they were said to have belonged to Thomas Jefferson before being lost for 200 years. The story embraces an international cast of larger-than-life characters, a subterranean laboratory where cutting-edge technology is used to date wine (think of it as CSI: Bordeaux), and the eccentric world of the very rich and wine-obsessed. Page 99 does contain many of the book’s essential elements: from pop-science narration of how wine ages and why it can improve over time, to a bit of the history of Thomas Jefferson’s well-documented connoisseurship, to the ratcheting up of the 21st-century mystery at the heart of the book, which ultimately leads to a far-flung investigation by ex-FBI and Scotland Yard agents. And three of the story’s principal characters appear on the page: Kip Forbes, the publishing heir who bought one of the bottles for a record-setting price ($156,000!); Michael Broadbent, the bicycle-riding English auctioneer who vouched for the bottles’ provenance; and Hardy Rodenstock, the shadowy German dealer who “found” the bottles. Out of curiosity, I looked to see whether I could make the “representative-page” case just as well for 98 or 100, and I actually could not. So, for this book at least, the test passes.

Read an excerpt from The Billionaire’s Vinegar, and learn more about the book and author at Benjamin Wallace's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Kristie Macrakis' "Seduced by Secrets"

Kristie Macrakis is a history professor at Michigan State University and a visiting professor in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University.

She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Seduced by Secrets: Inside the Stasi's Spy-Tech World, and reported the following:

I smiled when I opened my book to p. 99: not only was it a page I liked, but it was also representative of the style and content of the book. The page comes out of a chapter profiling two American servicemen -- code-named "Kid" and "Paul" -- who spied for the East German Ministry for State Security (MfS or Stasi) during the 1980s in Berlin.

The chapter compares and contrasts their very different motives for spying as well as including their damage to American national security. Unlike his more senior counter-part James Hall ("Paul"), the very young Jeff Carney ("Kid") spied because of his unstable psychological state related to his homosexuality.

After a short six months from the time he crossed the Berlin border during a Berlin pub tour, Carney returned to the Air Force Base in Texas as an instructor. Rumors spread that Carney found his lover dead in a bathtub and therefore decided to defect to East Germany.

The last paragraph on p. 99 describes the exfiltration:

A plan was soon hatched as to how to get Carney back to East Germany. The nearby Cubans had proven to be loyal friends of the East Germans and they gladly agreed to help. Carney was smuggled out through a laundry chute and flown to Cuba in a Cubana Airliner where he stayed for a week at a safe house in Varo Dero. The Cubans rolled out the red carpet and their hospitality. Fidel Castro said hello. Carney felt important.

Read an excerpt from the book, and visit the Seduced by Secrets website and Kristie Macrakis' faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Gregory Levey's "Shut Up, I’m Talking"

Gregory Levey served as a speechwriter and delegate for the Israeli government at the United Nations and as Senior Foreign Communications Coordinator for Prime Ministers Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert. He is on the faculty of Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book and reported the following:

I open my new memoir, Shut Up, I’m Talking: And Other Diplomacy Lessons I Learned in the Israeli Government, with some trepidation. I’m skeptical of the Page 99 Test.

My book is about my experience as a North American thrown headfirst into Middle East diplomacy. At twenty-five-years-old, I applied for an internship at the Israeli consulate in New York and was instead offered a fulltime job as a speechwriter, first at the UN Mission and later in the Prime Minister’s Office in Israel.

I flip through the book in search of page 99, with no idea what I’ll find there. At first glance, in fact, it’s an odd page. The top is the tail end of one scene and the rest is the beginning of something else entirely.

But after a moment I see that there might be something to the idea. The section that ends at the top has me moving from my first office in the UN Mission to my second. In the scene I’m delighted to note that my new office has a doorknob. In my first office, where I was writing speeches about terrorism for the UN Security Council, I was always annoyed by the fact that my door was missing a doorknob. Things in the Israeli government are often a bit improvisational.

The second half of the page has a passing reference to Ariel Sharon. At this point in the book, he is just a distant presence in Israel, but later on, his staff will offer me a job as his English Speechwriter in Jerusalem – an even more surreal turn of events that plunged me deeper into the bizarre world that is the Middle East.

So maybe it’s all there on page 99, after all. The United Nations and the Israeli Government. New York and Jerusalem. And a bewildered twenty-five-year-old flailing about amidst it all – unsure how he even got there in the first place.

Read an excerpt from Shut Up, I’m Talking, and learn more about the book and its author at Gregory Levey's website and his blog.

--Marshal Zeringue

I. Dowbiggin's "The Sterilization Movement and Global Fertility in the Twentieth Century"

Ian R. Dowbiggin is Professor of History and Chair, Department of History, University of Prince Edward Island. He is the author of Inheriting Madness: Professionalization and Psychiatric Knowledge in 19th C. France (1991), Keeping America Sane: Psychiatry and Eugenics in the United States and Canada, 1880-1940 (1997), Suspicious Minds: The Triumph of Paranoia in Everyday Life (1999) and A Merciful End: The Euthanasia Movement in Modern America (2003).

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his latest book, The Sterilization Movement and Global Fertility in the Twentieth Century, and reported the following:

If you turn to page 99 of my new book you go back in time to the 1950s when America was in the midst of a baby boom and birth control advocates were feverishly working on the oral contraceptive Pill. In a few short years activists like Margaret Sanger and John Rock would be celebrating the Pill as the solution to the perennial problem facing women and their partners: how to plan parenthood.

Little did they know that in no time at all the glamor of the Pill would wear off and the favorite form of contraception would be sterilization--vasectomy for men and tubal ligation for women. My book documents how that revolution in human reproductive behavior was launched and how it helped change the course of history. As governments grapple with the consequences of aging societies, the product of decades of mass contraception, policy-makers might be wondering: how did this all happen? Where have all the babies gone?

My book provides the answer. It tells the story of the men and women who convinced the world that sterilization was the best means of contraception for a planet wracked by an unprecedented population explosion. I also argue that the international community needs to reassess its approach to reproductive health issues in the 21st century. If not, depopulation could prove to be as big a problem as global warming to governments in the coming years.

Learn more about The Sterilization Movement and Global Fertility in the Twentieth Century at the Oxford University Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Allen Wyler's "Deadly Errors"

Allen Wyler is an internationally renown neurosurgeon and author of the thrillers, Deadly Errors and Dead Head.

He applied the “Page 99 Test” to Deadly Errors, and came up with:

Page 99 starts in the middle of a conversation between two minor characters and doesn’t give the flavor of the story or the writing. So I’d rather tell you about the plot.

In my practice, ideas for stories hit me at the most bizarre times. This book, for example. While serving on a committee to select a computerized medical records system for our medical center, I started wondering what might happen if the software had a bug that intermittently corrupted patient information. Could this ultimately kill patients? Yeah, probably. So this became the story’s kernel.

The push to switch from paper to electronic medical records is for a very good reason: computerization cuts down errors. Which is not a trivial issue. A 1999 study by the Institute of Medicine, To Err Is Human: Building A Safer Health System, reported that as many as 44,000 to 98,000 people die in hospitals each year from preventable medical errors. This makes preventable medical errors this country’s eighth leading cause of death — higher than motor vehicle accidents, breast cancer, or AIDS. About 7,000 people per year are estimated to die from medication errors alone. Although computers can definitely lower such errors, are they infallible? Shortly after the hardcover of Errors was released, I was contacted by a lawyer who specializes in just such cases. Scary.

So, the story goes like this: after fingering his boss for bilking Medicare out of millions, neurosurgeon Tyler Matthews framed for drug abuse and forced to complete a mandatory drug rehab program. After leaving San Francisco, he start his career over at a Seattle hospital. There he begins to suspect that the medical center’s revolutionary computerized medical records system is causing errors that kill patients. When he brings his concerns to management, he is not only scorned, but his life is put in danger and another potential whistle-blower turns up dead.

Read an excerpt from Deadly Errors, and learn more about the author and his work at Allen Wyler's website.

The Page 69 Test: Dead Head.

My Book, The Movie: Deadly Errors.

--Marshal Zeringue

Bill Emmott's "Rivals"

Bill Emmott is a writer, speaker and consultant on global affairs, with an expertise in Asia. Until 2006 he was editor in chief of The Economist, where his thirteen-year tenure was marked by many awards. He has published eight books and writes regularly for several international publications.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Rivals: How the Power Struggle Between China, India and Japan Will Shape Our Next Decade, and reported the following:

One page cannot of course be representative of a book’s substance and argument, but page 99 of Rivals does give a good sense of the approach and style that I have tried to use. My belief is that you cannot understand a society and its politics without also understanding its history and its economics; and that to understand Asia’s super-achievers in China and India it is essential also to look at Japan and other East Asian success stories, for Japan pioneered the paths that China and India are now following.

Thus, page 99 identifies some common aspects in the way Japan and China have been, and are, governed, even though one is a democracy and the other an authoritarian, nominally communist, regime. Elsewhere, I ask a former Japanese foreign minister what I should make of the recurrent tensions between China and Japan and he responds with a laugh: “China and Japan have hated each other for a thousand years. Why should it be any different now?” And yet there is also a lot that they have in common: their bureaucratic systems, their economic models, their environmental experiences.

The overall argument of Rivals is that Asia now needs to be understood both as a hotbed of political and economic competition—this is the first time in history when it has had three great powers all at the same time—and as an increasingly integrated continent. Japan’s growth was the big story of the first 80 years of the 20^th century; China’s emergence has been the big story of the past 25 years; but now India’s emergence, as a trading and manufacturing giant, looks likely to be the most important development of this decade and beyond. Not because it is going to overtake China, you understand. But rather because it sets up Asia’s new three-way power game, in which the United States will be a concerned but also active outside player.

Read an excerpt from Rivals, and learn more about the author and his work at Bill Emmott's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

Steven Heyman's "Free Speech and Human Dignity"

Steven J. Heyman is Professor of Law, Chicago-Kent College of Law.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Free Speech and Human Dignity, and reported the following:

The problem I address in this book is how the law should approach conflicts between free speech and other values such as dignity, equality, privacy, and freedom from violence. Such conflicts lie at the heart of many recent debates, from hate speech and pornography to antiabortion protests and picketing at military funerals. As everyone knows, it’s almost impossible to find common ground in disputes like this. Instead, the two sides tend to talk past each other. One side argues that the speech causes serious harm to individuals, groups, or the community at large. The other side responds that our commitment to free speech is measured by our willingness to protect it even when it causes serious harm or offends our deepest values. Unfortunately, the debate rarely seems to move beyond this point. The underlying problem is that we have no coherent framework that would allow us to decide when speech should be protected, and when it can be regulated to protect other values. As a result, First Amendment controversies often seem irresolvable.

In the book, I seek to overcome this problem by developing a liberal humanist theory of the First Amendment. According to this view, freedom of speech is founded on respect for the autonomy and dignity of human beings. But these values also support other fundamental rights, ranging from personal security and privacy to citizenship and equality. Speech that invades these rights is subject to regulation through narrowly drawn laws, except in cases where the value of the speech is sufficient to justify the injuries it causes. This theory recognizes a strong, liberal right to free expression at the same time that it protects against the most serious forms of assaultive speech. In this way, the theory seeks to find some common ground between civil libertarianism and its critics.

In the section that ends on page 99, I address a somewhat different problem. How should the First Amendment apply when the government is not restricting speech, but is providing affirmative support for it (for example, by funding the arts)? Once again, I develop a centrist position on this issue: although the government should have substantial authority to determine how public funds are allocated, it must do so in a way that is fair in light of the purposes of the program, and that respects the liberty and equality of individuals who wish to participate in it.

Learn more about Free Speech and Human Dignity at the Yale University Press website.

Visit Steven Heyman's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

James O'Toole's "The Faithful"

James M. O’Toole is Clough Millennium Professor of History at Boston College.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, The Faithful: A History of Catholics in America, and reported the following:

Page 99 of The Faithful discusses the role of immigrants in the Catholic Church in the US in the 19th century. In many ways, the story of the church in this country has been the story of immigrants, and this is as true today as it was in the past. Then, Catholic immigrants were coming mostly from Europe; today, they are from all over the world: Central and South America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. The ways in which the church has helped in their acculturation to their new country and the ways in which they have changed the church itself are very much a part of the story this book tells.

I also hope, however, that the book complicates that story. In the past, historians have tended to divide American Catholic history neatly into 3 periods: the pre-immigrant, immigrant, and post-immigrant church. I argue that it's better to think of six, which I call the Priestless Church (of the colonial era); the Church in the Democratic Republic (in the years before the Civil War); the Immigrant Church; the Church of Catholic Action (the early 20th century); the Church of Vatican II (the later 20th century); and the Church in the Twenty-first Century. By focusing on the experience of lay people, rather than the hierarchy and institutions of the church, I try to outline the characteristics of each period. In light of the still-ongoing crisis caused by the clergy sexual abuse scandal, understanding this history is, I believe, the first step in moving forward.

Read an excerpt from The Faithful, and learn more about the book at the Harvard University Press website.

Visit James O'Toole's faculty webpage.

--Marshal Zeringue

Blaize Clement's "Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues"

Blaize Clement is the author of Curiosity Killed the Cat Sitter and Duplicity Dogged the Dachshund.

She applied the "Page 99 Test" to Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues, the third book in the Dixie Hemingway mystery series, and reported the following:

When I went to page 99 of Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues, I first thought, "No, Ford was wrong." But by the time I'd read it several times, I had decided the test works.

In the first sentence, Florida pet sitter Dixie Hemingway, no relation to you-know-who, wakes up unable to move. It's late at night, she's lying on the grounds of a mansion, and in dazed confusion realizes somebody has conked her on the head. By the end of the page, she understands that the gray swirls moving so artfully through the trees is smoke, and she is forcing herself to stand up and do whatever she can to avert a tragedy.

That scene pretty much sums up the quality of the entire Dixie Hemingway Mystery Series. A former deputy, Dixie went a little crazy three years ago when her husband and child were killed by a man who hit the gas pedal instead of the brake in a supermarket parking lot. Thinking that working with pets would provide escape from the pain humans cause one another, she left the sheriff's department and became a pet sitter.

Since it's a mystery series, people are murdered. And since it's a "pet mystery" series, the stories are full of lovable pets. But while the series points up the fact that the highest ideals of love and loyalty are more frequently shown by pets than by humans, the real story is about Dixie's ongoing struggle to overcome grief and live and love as a normal young woman. In each book in the series, she grows in strength and courage.

As Page 99 of the third book in the series shows, Dixie always gets up and does her best. Even if she gets banged on the head by an arsonist in the middle of the night, even if she's hallucinating and too woozy to walk, Dixie by god stands up.

Read an excerpt from Even Cat Sitters Get the Blues, and learn more about the author and her work at Blaize Clement's website and her blog.

--Marshal Zeringue