#79

Dear Query Shark,

Have you ever peeked into someone else's medicine cabinet?

Or gotten a little thrill when you‚ve found yourself alone in another person‚s private space, like your boss‚s office after hours or your host‚s bedroom when you‚ve taken a wrong turn on the way to the bathroom?

Have you ever tingled with excitement as you watched the main character of a spy movie riffle through a cabinet drawer taking pictures of its contents, wishing the whole time it was you holding the tiny camera shaped like a pen?

You've taken up three paragraphs to describe one thing. Overkill. Get to the point.

Come on, you know you have. But the difference between Katie Tremaine and you is that this particular twenty-nine-year-old accountant can‚t control her urges to sneak around like a cat burglar or pretend to be James Bond. Katie is addicted to snooping around places she shouldn‚t be the way other people are addicted to cigarettes, chocolate cake or gambling, but there is nothing Katie can do for her particular jones short of joining the CIA or turning to a life of crime ˆ and she‚s really not into the whole danger, life-threatening thing.


So, I see that last sentence and think: how many other 56 word sentences are in this book? And that's it. I look at that and all I can see is "this is gonna need work." If you were describing something I'd never seen before it might be different but you've got a snooper (a tired trope) and the prospect of a lot of editing. I'd stop reading right here and say no thanks. Yes this is unfair; yes I might miss something. That's all true. It's still exactly what I'd do.

Assuming she will forever keep her semi-illicit urges under wraps, Katie is shocked when her friend Bernie, a private investigator, uncovers her proclivities and immediately grasps the usefulness of Katie talents. Bernie offers Katie the opportunity to make $5,000 retrieving a valuable piece of jewelry for one of his socialite clients from her ex-husband‚s estate. But when both the client and the ex wind up murdered, it‚s handsome police detective John Flynn who discovers Katie‚s involvement in the case and that her fingerprints are all over both crime scenes ˆ and Katie soon wishes she‚d taken up basket weaving instead of burglarizing.

There's a fundamental failure of logic here. Snooping doesn't mean sneak thief. If she's stealing stuff, you need to mention it in the first paragraph. And you'll want to go easy on the "only difference" cause I may have been known to open a medicine cabinet but I've never actually tried to steal the host's tiara.

Please consider reviewing my 85,000-word mystery novel The Taker. Thank you for your time and attention,as I know both are valuable. Yea well yours are too, let's not get all gushy and stuff.
And "reviewing" isn't what I do. Michiko reviews. I consider. I read. I fling myself at work I love. I do not review.

Sincerely,


Don't you love all those weird ass punctuation marks? Yea, me neither. It doesn't stop me from reading your query, but if you are obsessive about this kind of thing you need to figure out how to make it stop. Commenters here will have good advice about it too, I'm sure.