Face-Lift 1545

Guess the Plot

The Last Bounty

1.Naming a ship "Bounty" is asking for mutiny, destruction . . . and FAME, which is what John Doe (real name) wants. So he buys a sailboat, employs an immigrant, and somehow gets involved with smuggling not-illegal breadfruit.

2. A worldwide shortage of trees culminates in the last roll of Bounty Paper towels being aucrtioned off at Sotheby's for 37 million dollars.

3. Bounty hunter Chuck Laramie is enjoying his well-earned retirement when the U.S. Marshall Service offers him a job he can't refuse: hunt down the terrorist who blew up the James Garfield Memorial in Washingtn D.C.

4, Anya is hired to track some travelers to a mysterious city, but when she gets there she's captured and forced to participate in death matches where each loser becomes undead . . . and so does each winner.

Original Version

I am seeking representation for The Last Bounty, a 120,000-word, romantic-comedy, [That's as far as many agents will read. There's a reason Schindler's List is twice as long as When Harry Met Sally. Why Oppenheimer is an hour longer than Barbie. It's because people who can stomach countless hours of Nazi atrocities and nuclear war, have a limited ability to sit through a romantic comedy longer than 1:45.] fantasy novel about a bounty hunter who takes a job spying on a party of travelers and ends up competing in a deathmatch designed to weed out entrants into an elite, undead military. [Whoa. At the risk of overdoing irrelevant movie analogies, this sounds more like Dawn of the Dead meets The Hunger Games than a romantic comedy.] [Also, "death match" seems to be one word only in video gaming.]

Anya is a woman of ill-repute, taking on mercenary work to drink, fuck and gamble off every payment she receives. [While I appreciate your desire to work an F-bomb into the first sentence of your plot summary, drinking and gambling away her income is bad, but fucking is supposedly what brings the money in. Spending her income on that would be like Evil Editor paying someone to edit his blog. A terrible business model.] A powerful necromancer, she enjoys collecting bones and sinew from each kill to graft together undead creations; ‘art projects’ as she euphemistically calls them. [So woman of ill repute is her day night job, and killing people is her side gig.] [Or have I got that backwards?]

Loyal, but frustrated with her distant master, the death god Thross, she channels the powers he granted her to raze bandits, hunt monsters, and drink far more than most mortals could ever survive. Now, after six years on the road, a creeping addiction has overtaken her, growing with each new job. Anya hungers for excitement, for gold, and occasionally, for exotic body parts, which has rendered her increasingly greedy for new work. [She's starting to sound more like a hitwoman than a mercenary.] [Blogger doesn't think hitwoman is one word, but Google begs to differ, which is odd, as Google owns Blogger.]

 So, when a local official offers her a job of tailing a group of rich strangers traveling to the mysterious kingdom of Lossae, she takes it without hesitation. The chill warnings from Thross go unheeded as she stumbles through forests and mountains to tail a party of wealthy warriors who are closely guarded by undead members of Lossae’s elite military force, the Reformed.

Meanwhile, King Casimir Alwin has everything a powerful, lich king could want. ["Lich" seems to be another gaming term. No need for that comma before "lich."] His kingdom, Lossae, has stood strong after five hundred years of bureaucratic tyranny.  He has six, [No comma.] loving consorts, a populace that worships him as a god, and now he gets to host a grand party with some of the most demented nobility in the known world. They are gathered for the Trials, a fight to the death where each competitor is reformed as an undead soldier and placed in his ranks based on how they performed. An honor that anyone in the kingdom of Lossae would die for. And the final destination for the travelers that Anya is tailing.

When Anya is caught at the border, she manages to kill two of his Reformed guards in her failed attempt to escape. However, Alwin, in a twist of strange mercy, elects to spare her. Her bloodthirsty will to survive and low cunning would serve her [him?] well, as his necromancer. That is, provided she can survive in the Trials. [I was under the impression each competitor in the Trials became undead. Maybe describe the Trials as fights to the death in which each loser is reformed as an undead soldier. If that's the case. Or is becoming undead surviving?] 

My Last Bounty [I see you've changed the title.] pulls on the combined sexual positivity and emotional depth of Ruby Dixon’s Bull Moon Rising  with the dark humor in the face of horror brought by Tales from the Gas Station by Jack Townsend.  My Last Bounty interrogates that nature of romance, attachment, and power in a setting where vastly different political systems coexist through a system of high-stakes elite entanglements and familiar bureaucratic incompetence. 

Thank you for your consideration

Notes

Like your book, your query is too long. Plus, while it's true you can't spell "necromancer" without "romance," there's no romance or comedy in the query, unless you call Alwin letting Anya fight to the death instead of just killing her a romantic gesture. And funny.

I don't see why a powerful necromancer needs to work as a woman of ill repute. Or as a mercenary. If she needs dead bodies for her hobby, she can use her powers to get them. And she ought to be able to use her powers to avoid being captured by Alwin's zombies. And she should have no trouble winning her match in the Trials. What, exactly, are her powers?

A bounty hunter is supposed to capture her target, dead or alive, or possibly just kill them. Her job here seems to be just to follow them to Lossae . . . and then what? Report back that they made it? What's her mission?

 Here's a version of the plot summary that's a good length for a query:

Anya, a powerful necromancer by day, and a contract killer by night, enjoys collecting bones and sinew from her kills to graft together undead creations; ‘art projects’ as she calls them. She channels the powers granted her by the death god Thross, to raze bandits and hunt monsters. And yet she hungers for more excitement, more gold, more exotic body parts. So, when a local official offers her a job tailing a group of rich strangers traveling to the mysterious kingdom of Lossae, she takes it without hesitation.

King Casimir Alwin, of Lossae, has everything a powerful king could want, and this year he gets to host a grand party with some of the most demented nobility in the known world. They are gathered for the Trials, fights to the death in which each loser is "reformed" as an undead soldier. An honor that anyone in the kingdom of Lossae would die for.

When Anya is captured at the border, she manages to kill two of Alwin's Reformed guards in a failed attempt to escape. Alwin, in a twist of mercy, elects to spare her. Her bloodthirsty will to survive and her cunning would serve him well, as his necromancer . . . if she can survive the Trials.

That's a good length, but I think we need to know more about what she's there to do. She followed some travelers to Lossae because she wanted gold, excitement, body parts. Did she get all that? Do we even care? Does she discover that her goals have changed and what she really wants is to be Alwin's queen?