Dear Query Shark:
Architect Ryan Friedricks wanted to add some excitement to his life. He found it. Now it may kill him.
In FAKE, a 77,000-word novel of intrigue, Ryan meets pretty tourist Laurie Carson in Florence, a city that has seen six hundred years of deceit and double-crossing. He takes her to bed and wakes up with his life turned upside-down. Laurie tells him she’s investigating a scam that separates Holocaust survivors from their Nazi-looted art. She persuades Ryan to help her by impersonating a wealthy art collector with his sights set on an extraordinary stolen portrait.
But once Ryan finds himself in the middle of a Russian gang war, targeted by a police death squad, followed, beaten, bugged, and hijacked
,he and discovers Laurie lied about everything – everything – after she said “Hello.”
FAKE will appeal to fans of the classic “innocent man” story epitomized by North by Northwest and Alan Furst’s The World at Night and Kingdom of Shadows.
The completed manuscript of FAKE,
77,000 words, is available for your review. Thank you for your time and consideration.
Sincerely,
The heck with critiquing this. Send pages at once.
Wow. Score for somebody!
ReplyDeleteGood stuff! I like it when somebody scores!
ReplyDelete:)
Jean
Me likey too!
ReplyDeletewoot!
ReplyDeleteIt's a very tried and true story. Always a fun time when a guy takes a pretty woman to bed and she turns out to be filled with deceit. There's always a fun time when a love-struck boob starts running for his life because she's tricked him.
ReplyDeleteThe query is right there, all the elements in their proper place, succinct, to the point and easily understood. If the novel is written in the style of the query - plain, straightforward, compact English, - that's a winner. That's why style matters in a query.
I have to agree with the others, this packs a punch. Well done to the author.
ReplyDeleteWord verification: Powhu - exactly what this query had. :)
Score! Good job!
ReplyDeleteCongratulations to the writer!
ReplyDeleteAnd obviously I'm not the target audience for this, because I didn't find the query very intriguing. I feel like I don't know enough about the story to really be hooked by the scenario.
All the same, who cares? It's the agent's opinion that counts! Great work, writer. :-D
Kudos to the querier! Let's hope it leads to bigger and better things.
ReplyDeleteSolid query in the right genre to the right agent at the right time.
ReplyDeleteWe have a winner!
Ohhh, and did anybody else notice that the author listed no previous publishing credits?
ReplyDeleteJust goes to show ya...
I find it interesting that Janet did not say anything about the references to other books. Is this a standard bit for a query letter? If so, should I mention the DVC in my query #14 or will it turn off an agent?
ReplyDelete>>If so, should I mention the DVC in my query #14 or will it turn off an agent?
ReplyDeleteOUt of curiosity, I'd like to hear Janet weigh in on this too. I almost wonder with a mega-bestseller like TVC if the comparison could be more of a hindrance than a help whereas the reference to a Hitchcock classic seems to work in this particular query.
Put me down in the YAY column as well!!
ReplyDeleteVery nice!
This is the first time a "will appeal to readers of..." type statement in a query has ever worked for me. I think the reason it does work is because I don't feel like the writer is saying his book is either similar to the named stories or some kind of hybrid. He's saying that Fake is an 'innocent man' story in the same way that NbyNW is and 'innocent man' story. Wow! That gives me a really good picture.
ReplyDeleteAlways nice to see a positive example! Congrats and here's hoping.
ReplyDeleteTo Ken: What I've heard from agents is that comparisons to DVC or HP don't do the querier any favors. Even if you're in the same genre, Brown and Rowling are so wildly successful they're really sui generis.
You'd do better to have a comparison to other, more modestly successful works in the genre. Just my .02 based on conversations with others in the biz.
Ok, Janet, I'm curious. What was the grabber in this query? Is it the concept? Was it the 'innocent man' comparison combined with the setup? As far as queries go, this seems to me to leave out just what's at stake here. Is it one of those things where there's just enough interesting elements listed that you are intrigued to find out more? Of course, if that's the case, that's really all a writer needs to do, because no matter how incomplete the query may be, if you want to read more the writer has done their job well enough.
ReplyDeleteI liked the writing. It's crisp and clear. It has energy.
ReplyDeleteI can fill in the blanks pretty easily on the plot that wasn't there, and I'm always ready to read a story about art.
Going back to read through the queries, I'm quite far back. I wonder if this book was published in the intervening seven years. Maybe the Shark could have a section highlighting those that survived the swim through her waters?
ReplyDeleteThis by no means is meant as an insult to the author. Congrats on a win! My concern is this query does nothing for me. In fact, when I read, "takes her to bed" I was done. But I kept reading in order to learn. The reason I write this is, I see a lot of queries like this mentioned by agents. Boring, I-don't-care, scenarios that I'm supposed to use as an example. (Again, PLEASE don't think I'm diminishing the author's writing!) I need help understanding the entice in this. Is it simply because I'm not into adult fiction? I don't dig romance? Help?
ReplyDelete