Guess the Plot
Closure
1. Margaret won't get closure until she can bury her dead husband, but an autopsy is required and the only pathologist left yesterday on a two-week vacation and the morgue refrigeration system isn't working. Can small-town veterinarian Ted Lipscomb step up and save the day?
2. Lawyer Mike Kasey has the case of the century. But can he defend his client when aliens are involved?
3. Finnegan is in the business of making sure certain cold cases stay Otzi cold, especially those in his wake. But when one death turns out to be living unimpaired, he's in a race to find the others and make corrections before he ends up on ice.
4. Hook and eye, ties, straps, pins, clips, snaps, laces, buttons, zippers, velcro: a guide to the fasteners that have kept clothing on throughout the ages. Includes amusing anecdotes about celebrity wardrobe malfunctions.
5. Four recent deaths, seemingly connected only by their oddness, have stumped the detectives, but police officer John Pierce realizes all the victims are connected by an evil crime they got away with. Should Pierce stop the vigilante who's killing people who deserve it? Or help him?
Original Version
Dear {Agent},
Jimmy Leary, a man who abused drugs and women, boards the train to hell with an apparent suicide. The Smith & Wesson .357 is still wedged in his tonsils, but he wasn’t thought to be the suicidal type. [This had me thinking Jimmy and someone who committed suicide boarded the train together. Maybe replace "with" with a comma, or "after."] [Also, I'm not sure his tonsils would still exist.] [Also, having read the rest of the query, it's now clear that Jimmy did not literally board the train to hell. You probably don't want to give the impression, in sentence 1, that your book has fantastical elements . . . unless it does.]
Frank Fowler dies in a house fire – which is ironic, because he was a firefighter. Evidence discovered at the autopsy points [leads] investigators to conclude Fowler himself stupidly torched the house by accident. [I suspect a list titled "Most Common Occupations of People who Die in House Fires" would have firefighters near the top. Though it's rarely their own house . . . ] [Also, how the fire started seems like something that would be revealed by an investigation of the site, not an autopsy.]
Nicole Martel’s death is suspicious, but no one can figure out the source of what poisoned her. Odd that the mysterious man who appeared at The Lounge one summer afternoon and flirted from the bar stool next to her is never seen again. [Hard to prove he was never seen again by anyone. If you mean by anyone in the bar, that doesn't seem odd to me. I've been in several bars that I never returned to (usually at the owners' requests).]
And Matt Brown is killed when his motorcycle slams into a stack of Jersey barriers on the side of the street. Battered from being catapulted seventy feet into the weeds, his passenger tells first responders the police car chasing them caused the crash. [It had nothing to do with Matt's refusal to pull over.]
Meet John Pierce: husband, father, police officer. An implausible tip leads him to pick at the thread and unravel a noble vigilante’s scheme to settle the score and give closure to an innocent girl. Four deaths already bob in the vigilante’s wake. The cost of John’s investigation of a most unlikely suspect is tragically realized one spring evening outside the home of Russell Martel, another man with that evil crime in his past. [What evil crime?] In the end, confirming what John knew all along: No one is above the law. [I think I'd prefer you not reveal anything about the ending than to reveal it in such vague terms.]
CLOSURE, a 96,000-word reality-based whodunit, might appeal to fans of Joseph Wambaugh and John Grisham, and to viewers of The Wire and Southland.
Thank you for your time and consideration, and I look forward to hearing from you!
Notes
Wouldn't the tipster have contacted a detective rather than a lowly police officer in order to get the connection among these deaths investigated? Does this cop even have the time and training to take this on?
Does the innocent girl know these people are being killed?
I'm not sure listing all the deaths is the way to go in the query. It's like you're changing the subject every couple sentences. If you started:
When police detective John Pierce receives an anonymous tip revealing the connection among four recent deaths in his precinct/town, he opens an investigation that confirms all the victims attended the same high school at the same time.
...you could spend most of the query on John's investigation, and not on the deaths. Which I assume is what most of the book is about.
