Mar 30, 2010

QUERY - MEND (Revised)

Click here to read the original query.


He attacks. He springs upon his victims with hatred and blind fury, slashing their bodies and shredding the peace of The City Too Busy to Hate. He kills. With no evidence left behind, four Atlanta families have fallen in his wake, and he is not finished.

Fifteen years have passed since the day Jacob Santos opened his eyes and found his mother brutally murdered. For years he has been tormented by an unattainable desire for revenge. Unattainable, until now. Following a murder in a downtown Atlanta neighborhood, a murder that mirrors his mother’s, Jacob receives a message:

“Got another for you.”

It is an invitation from the man Jacob has spent his entire adult life envisioning killing; a provocation to come out and play a deadly game of cat and mouse. And Jacob does just that. The only help the self-proclaimed investigator receives comes from an unorthodox source; the ghost of a childhood friend that haunts both him and the killer alike. Hidden behind the specter’s cryptic messages lays the true link between the hunter and the hunted, and the only means to decipher which is which.

However, unveiling the secret might come at too high a price for the lone investigator’s fragile mind, since the killer he so desperately seeks has never been further than a mere glimpse in the mirror. Now Jacob must find a way to mend is fractured psyche, before the police catch up to him, before another family is slaughtered, before his mind and his soul are lost forever. He cannot fail. Doing so will turn him from the best hope to stop the killings, and into the catalyst of an unprecedented murderous rampage.

4 comments:

DG said...

Why is "the city too busy to hate," capitalized?

Otherwise, it reads well.

Best of luck to you.

scott g.f.bailey said...

"an unattainable desire for revenge" means that the desire is unattainable, not the revenge. I doubt that's what you want to say.

I also think that you take a long time to get to the story here. I might skip the first paragraph and most of the second. I might start with something like:

Fifteen years after his mother's brutal murder, Jacob Santos receives a message from the killer, who was never caught.

Inelegant, but it gets to the point a lot faster.

scott g.f.bailey said...

Wait: Jacob is the killer?

Jm Diaz said...

Thanks for the advice, and yes, Jacob is the killer. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it ;)

The city too busy to hate was capitalized because it was a stand in for a proper noun. In this case Atlanta. Like "The City that Never Sleeps". Is that not correct? I was going with lower case, bit was told no caps it.

Again, thanks.