Joined: 2/14/2015
Posts: 16
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(now on it's 18th rejection as of today)
Brooke Landon’s day was already crappy by the time she caught her high-speed train from the suburbs into New Detroit. But nothing prepared her for the screeching U-turn her life would take just a few minutes into the commute. Two explosions later, she’s trying desperately to escape the carnage when a young kid from the same TriNova STEM Academy she once attended hands her a tiny, out-moded data disk before being shot in the back by the company’s private security force. Then she glances down at her right wrist to find her implanted fertility monitor burning a red hole in her skin.
Pregnant? Not possible. Only couples with thousands of dollars to throw at the proprietary infertility treatments provided by TriNova had a shot at that.
As a recently promoted IT geek at that very company with a construction manager husband, she hadn’t even bothered to get on the massive wait-list of employees wanting the expensive treatment. As minorities, both Brooke and her husband Adam are recipients of company paid academy educations and are firm believers in the TriNova promise of a better life through hard work and focus on company goals.
Or so she thought.
Brooke wakes to find herself in a hospital and facing the notorious “Matteo,” head of the TriNova security force that rules New Detroit with a secretive, iron fist—the same group that killed a teenaged boy in cold blood in the chaos on the train. Questions are flying at her about Adam. Where is he? Why is he missing from work? What does she know about his anti-TriNova terrorist activity? Is she involved in the train bombing?
She has no idea what they’re talking about—but figures she might have a clue in the old-fashioned micro disk the poor dead teenager handed her on the decimated train.
Within hours her miraculous pregnancy is confirmed and she finds herself ensconced in posh Precious Vessel Clinic Number 1, feeling like a prisoner crossed with a guinea pig.
When she watches her husband killed execution style by Matteo himself in an apparent attempt at evading arrest on live television, her sense of unreality escalates, forcing her to act. She manages to escape the PV clinic with the disk and make it home, only to find Matteo waiting at her company-owned apartment with more unanswerable questions.
Precious Vessel is a 97,803 word thriller set in future Detroit. It’s similar in concept to Margaret Atwood’s “Oryx and Crake” trilogy, with an evil corporation controlling all aspects of society including the source and treatment of illness, but with a civil/reproductive rights and media message spin control angle, set in an actual city not too far into the future. It features a female protagonist, Brooke Landon, who is the “heroine" in at least two more planned Detroit-based thriller/mystery novels.
In the past six years I’ve had books published with Ellora’s Cave, Decadent Publishing and Tri-Destiny Publishing and have just released my first self-published series. The "Stewart Realty” series (Tri-Destiny) has topped “family saga” and “urban fiction” best seller lists twice since being released in 2010. I’m a licensed Realtor and part owner/founder of a successful craft microbrewery in Ann Arbor. Many of my books are set in those worlds and most are categorized as “romance” although some hard core romance readers disavow my realistic plots and characters. While Precious Vessel relies heavily on Brooke's relationships with the people around her and has an element of eroticism thanks to the non-stop messages relayed to New Detroit’s citizens regarding their civic responsibility to engage in “reproductive activity” in order to reverse an apparent zero population growth trend, it is not a romance novel.
My social networking links and Amazon/Goodreads pages are here:
I hope you will consider Precious Vessel for representation.
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Hi, LizCrowe 
I'm in no way an expert on query letters. However, I did get some great feedback on my own, which you can see here: http://www.bookcountry.com/Community/Discussion/Default.aspx?g=posts&t=8589936792
Query letters have one goal: to get the readers to want to read on. Yours, the way it is now, doesn't suck me in. There's too much description and unnecessary info. In short, there's too many words. I suggest you Google or Bing successful query letters.
Hope that helps.
Amber
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