Face-Lift 686

Guess the Plot

The Trinity Saints

1. Mikey will do anything to make Trinity High School's varsity basketball team - even a little voodoo to ask the loa spirits for their blessing and aid. But as the season ramps up, Mikey finds the spirits increasingly hard to shake. The loa are determined to take Mikey all the way to a championship - whether he wants their help or not.

2. It should have been a dream job for one of Satan's minions: night warden in the eerie and oppressive library at Dublin's Trinity College. And it was--until the Trinity Saints popped up and started witnessing. All night long. Every night. Insanity ensues.

3. A superhero team consisting of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost fight crime in Vatican City. Not a bad gig--until the villain known as the Antichrist sets up shop next to St. Peter's. Can our heroes take him down without causing Armageddon?

4. After eighteen years living with nuns, Hope is finally ready to follow her calling. She joins the Trinity Saints, and begins her training . . . as a ruthless assassin.

5. A boy, a girl and a manatee, living and loving together in Trinity Bay, Florida.

6. The Trinity University Saints haven't had a winning season since 1966. The new coach, Dante "The Inferno" Jones, plans on changing that with a training regimen that makes the seven levels of hell look like an amusement park. Angelo Nicks leads the players in a rebellion.


Original Version

Dear Evil Editor,

Have you ever wondered what lies beneath the faceless mask of a trained killer? [No, but only because I'm not sure I know what you mean by a faceless mask. I Googled it, but most of the images for faceless masks actually looked like faces. This one looks faceless, but he also looks like he would make a really bad trained killer.] What’s revealed when that mask of indifference is removed? Sometimes it’s an evil face of one whose humanity is lost forever and sometimes it’s the innocent face of one who has been betrayed in the worst way.

Hope O'Reilly is an example of a woman caught in a never-ending tangled web of lies, deceit and conspiracy tracing back to her birth. ["Never-ending" is not an adjective to be tossed around lightly. Especially in this case, as I suspect the web ends before the book does.] The only survivor of a viscous car accident [The car went into a skid when it hit a patch of honey.] that claimed the lives of her mother, father and twin sister, Hope is sent to the county orphanage to be raised by nuns. Eighteen years later, she's recruited into The Trinity Saints, a company that trains her to be not only cunning and ruthless, but also emotionless and lethal. For the next five years, she burrows a hole for herself [Not the clearest of metaphors--unless she's become a gopher.] in this new and exotic world; reveling in the excitement that seems to go hand in hand with the danger she faces on a daily basis.

When her current job gets botched by her resentful double and mysterious packages begin to arrive, plaguing her to the truth behind her family's demise, ["Plaguing" isn't the word you want.] Hope returns home to seek the answers she’s so desperate to find. When her bosses, The Trinity Saints, are less than forthcoming, she decides it's time to take a small vacation and only then does she begin to piece together the twenty-five year old puzzle that put her on the path to where she is today.

With the help of a gorgeous assassin next door, Hope uncovers a much deeper sense of humanity within herself [Because when you're seeking a deep sense of humanity, who better to turn to than an assassin?] and a more serious desire for retribution. Her quest for truth leads her to the one person she never suspected, [Of what?] the loving nun who raised her - her maternal grandmother. A woman whose [who's] been grooming Hope to one day take her place in the hierarchy of a secret organization who span the world over. Hope learns her mother was the only one to die in the accident that began the domino effect her life has been. [Consider trying our next bad analogy exercise.] [Is the 18 years between the accident and her recruitment one domino?] She has to decide if having family is worth the misery that seems to accompany them.

Growing up as a girl, surrounded by boys, I became a sassy tomboy with a quick tongue and an affinity for hunting, fishing and shooting. These have allowed me to create both an enjoyable and believable heroine involved in a roller coaster ride of danger, excitement and power. [If anything can prepare you to write about danger, excitement and power, it's trawlin' for catfish down at the ol' fishin' hole.] I’ve recently had a short story published on Celis T. Rono’s Collective Writer’s site.

The Trinity Saints is a 72,000 word chick lit thriller/mystery perfect for today’s woman who wants a witty, yet suspenseful tale of cat versus mouse; a tale where the mouse finally wins. [If you describe your book as cat versus mouse, it should be obvious who the cat and the mouse are. Who's the cat?] [Also, I can't recall a cat versus mouse tale in which the mouse didn't win.] May I send you my completed manuscript for your consideration?


Notes

Too many words, without saying what's important. Spell out the plot clearly. The Trinity Saints train assassins? Is Hope a hitman? Do the Saints just kill bad guys, or can anyone hire them? Why was Hope put in an orphanage but not her sister? Assuming her sister is her resentful double, what was she doing for eighteen years? Who's the cat? Grandma? Hope's father?

It appears there's a world-wide network of orphanages run by nuns, from which a group called The Trinity Saints recruits assassins or spies. From the early statement that the face beneath the mask is sometimes that of someone who's been betrayed, I assume the Saints aren't exactly saints. Instead of telling us Hope burrows a hole in her new world, give us some specifics on what she does.

The "Growing up a girl..." paragraph can go.