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Guess the Plot

The Secret Life of a Pet Detective

1. Clark needs money to pay his debts. He discovers there's a reward being offered to anyone who finds a missing poodle. So he hangs his shingle, and the rest is history.

2. By day, he's a pet detective. But at night, Trent Faxbury is secretly . . . still a pet detective. Because night is when nocturnal pets like owls, raccoons, and bats commit their crimes.

3. When Ace Ventura, pet detective, sets up a branch office across the street from Michele Lawrence, pet detective, it means war. This block of Main Street isn't big enough for both of them, and she was here first.

4. Antoine, parrot extraordinaire, helps Mindy Mills (age 7) as she helps her classmates discover what their pets need and want in life. But on the side, Antoine is a stooge involved in exotic bird rescue and return. The crackers hit the fan when he falls for a sexy macaw smuggling pangolins.

5. When her pet detective business slows to a crawl during the pandemic, Paula moonlights as a magpie detective, finding missing bracelets, keys, and other sparkly objects stolen by the winged sneak-thieves.

Original Version

Dear agent, 

I saw on your MSWL that you’re looking for______. I hope you’ll consider my adult mystery novel THE SECRET LIFE OF A PET DETECTIVE complete at 75,000 words. It combines the whip-smart detective from G.T. Karber’s Murdlebook series in [with] the eccentric small town [characters] of Kristen Perrin’s How to Solve Your Own Murder. It features #ownvoice Asian American experience with a multicultural cast, themes of found family, and unreliable narrators. [Better to put this paragraph at the end of the plot summary. Also, the Murdle books are not a good comp for a novel. They're just collections of short logic problems that the author made about murders. In which case the whip-smart detective who solves the crimes is the reader. It's almost like comparing your novel to the wit in Jumble, the scrambled word game. Also, maybe it's just me, but it kinda sounds like you're saying you took Karber's detective and put him in Perrin's town. So maybe say something like : It combines a Sherlockian detective with eccentric small town characters like those in Kristen Perrin’s How to Solve Your Own Murder.] 

Twenty-three-year-old Clark Zhang is dying on the inside. After being booted out of Harvard, [why?] he finds himself having to study online to finish his degree while also juggling three dead-end jobs to assist paying off his parents’ mortgage they took to pay his student fees. If only he could escape that mediocre life. When his cop buddy, Stephen McCarthy, offers him a gig searching for the wealthy Baxter family's missing poodle, he pounces on the opportunity. With the reward money, Clark could act as a guarantor to prevent the bank from foreclosing his parents’ house. [That was a lot of words to say:

Booted out of Harvard for cheating, Clark Zhang is juggling three dead-end jobs to pay off his debts when his cop buddy Stephen offers him a gig searching for the wealthy Baxter family's missing poodle. With the reward money, Clark could pay down his parents' mortgage before the bank forecloses on their house. It's the least he can do, as they paid his tuition.

Now I have a couple questions. Why does this cop get to offer this gig? Usually the pet owner puts up some notices with a photo of the missing dog. Did the Baxters contact the police about their missing pet, and the police said, We'll put our best man right on it? If I asked a cop to find my dog, I wouldn't be happy if he pawned the job off on some guy who just got thrown out of school for being a heroin addict or stealing his roommate's wallet or torturing the dean's border collie. Also, most of the rewards for missing pets that I've seen have been a couple hundred dollars, tops. Clark apparently expects to get enough to make a few mortgage payments, cover the lost income from his jobs, escape his mediocre life, and retire to Beverly Hills.]

Then, he discovers why he was hired: someone wants the family heir, fifteen-year-old John Baxter, dead. [Usually it's the heir who wants someone dead, namely his parents. Who's second in line to inherit? That's my guess for the top suspect. Although, unless the parents are dying, killing the heir won't matter for decades. I suspect someone just wants John dead because he's a jerk, and it has nothing to do with his being the heir. In which case maybe you should call him 15-year-old John Baxter Jr.] Only a harmless pet-detective like Clark can dig around town using the missing poodle as a cover story and find the origins of the death threats targeting John. [Is there a missing poodle?]

[Mrs.Baxter: Our son's getting death threats! Call the police. 

Mr. Baxter: Already did. They said death threats aren't their field of expertise, so they handed it off to a novice pet detective.] 

But with Baxter's reputation, it seems every townie might just have a motive for East Valley's golden boy’s murder.

When a [household] security guard of the household is killed and John disappears, it's up to Clark to save the day. [Because murder and missing persons/kidnapping cases also aren't the police department's field of expertise. Is there any crime this police department won't foist off on a pet detective? When you dial 9-1-1 in this town, the operator asks, ambulance, fire department or pet detective?] With a Foreclosure notice looming over him, he can’t turn back, even when the death threats start showing up in his apartment. [He can't turn back from finding the poodle. He can offload the job of finding John to the FBI.] [No need to capitalize "foreclosure."]

I’m a Chinese Canadian female writer passionate about mysteries and multicultural narratives, who spends too much money on audiobooks.  

Thank you for considering my submission

Notes

I'm not sure why asking around about a missing kid requires the cover story that you're asking around about a missing dog.

It seems Clark expects to walk into some seedy part of town, and it goes:

Clark: Have you seen a poodle?

Shady character: No. Now get lost, I'm trying to compose a death threat letter.

Do these death threats to John just say I'm gonna kill you, or is there an "if you X" or "unless you Y"? Death threat sent to Clark: Either you stop trying to find out who's sending death threats to John, or we'll kill you.

You might want to provide some evidence that your whip-smart detective knows what he's doing. He's basically a loser with no experience investigating crime. Or finding dogs.

What are the top motives people have for murdering John? How did he get a reputation so bad that every one in town has a motive to murder him? All we know about him is he's the golden boy. Not everyone who's called "golden boy" is necessarily hated. Take Tom Brady. Okay, he's hated, but not in his home town.

Much about this strikes me as middle grade. Imagine 15-year-old Clark got booted out of high school and has to find 12-year-old John. Clark sees lost dog notices and decides to go after the reward. Not to pay back his parents for tuition, but just to help them out of debt. You might have to drop the murdered security guard, and there are few reasons a 12-year-old would be getting death threats. Then again, there aren't so many reasons a 15-year-old would get them.

With a missing son (and poodle?) the Baxters should be getting ransom demands, not death threats.

It's possible everything I've brought up is neatly explained in the book, but if it's not explained in the query, the reader may not assume there are logical explanations.