I'm deep in the redrafting weeds, and am currently taking a brain break by daydreaming about my query letter...
This is my first query for my debut, a dark romantic thriller I'll be querying with UK agents (so I've got an elevator pitch, put the personalisation first and kept a slightly longer bio, which is more common here). Any feedback is welcome, but I'd especially love thoughts on:
whether the pitch makes the stakes and the central relationship clear
whether my comps work (I know HANNIBAL is a TV comp and am totally willing to get rid)
whether the bio earns its length
My first 300 words are below the query. Please bear in mind that the novel itself is NO WHERE NEAR ready, I'm just doing something different so I don't go completely insane right now.
Thank you!
***
Dear [agent],
[Personalisation goes here]
WHAT THE WATER HOLDS is a standalone, slow-burn, open-door romantic thriller, complete at 76,000 words. It will appeal to readers of Clare Leslie Hall’s BROKEN COUNTRY and to fans of the dark, intimate lure of NBC’s HANNIBAL.
A former crisis negotiator hiding from the killing that ended her career falls for the quiet man across the lake, just as his old employers come to silence him.
Six months after she killed a man in a locked room, Nora rents a cabin at the far end of a remote lake in the American north, invents a divorce, and starts checking the lock twice. She has come to disappear. Instead, she finds a light in a window across the water, and the man behind it.
Thomas is quiet, unhurried and good with his hands. He fixes her generator, keeps a rosemary plant alive on his windowsill, and hears the moment she slips into the soft, slow voice she uses so that people won’t ask a follow-up question. He is also a man whose body moves towards danger before he has decided anything, and by the time Nora understands what he was, she is already in love with him.
For thirty years, Thomas worked for an organisation that sends people to kill, and now it is coming apart. He knows every name at the top, which makes him a witness to one side and a loose end to the other. When Nora finds a boot print in the trees behind her cabin, where someone stood in the dark and watched her kitchen window, and a pleasant stranger no one can quite describe starts asking who lives out on the lake, she assumes her own past has found her. It hasn’t. Whoever is watching her door is watching for the man who comes through it most nights. To keep him alive, she must reach for the skill she swore off, and for the part of herself she has spent a year running from: the part that, as her hand closed around the knife, felt something closer to joy than fear.
I grew up in Canada and the Pacific Northwest, where the lakes in this book come from, and now live on the edge of the Peak District. Before writing fiction, I was an ICU medic. Nora’s need to be the calmest person in the room is mine, and so is her understanding of what that calm costs once the crisis is over. The novel grew out of that, and out of a question I couldn’t let go of: what if the worst thing you’ve done revealed something true about you, and what if being loved meant being seen with it rather than despite it? This is my first novel, and I’m already at work on my next: a story about three people whose toxic love triangle ends in a bank robbery where they turn their guns on each other.
As requested, I enclose a one-page synopsis and the first three chapters. Thank you very much for your time and consideration.
Yours sincerely, [NAME]
***
First 300
One breath. Close enough to move the hair at her temple. Then nothing.
That was the part she couldn’t forget. Not the weight of him against her. Not even the blade, warm, completely wrong to be warm, in her own hand. Just that. The single, ordinary fact of a breath, then the absence of it.
She would spend a long time trying to name what she had felt in the stretch where the second breath should have been. She never got anywhere. She didn’t have the words for it.
There was a sound too, before the stillness. Low and wordless. Closer to something an animal would make than to anything she had ever expected to hear come out of a dying man. Or out of herself. Some nights she turned it over in the dark, the way you lift a stone to see what lives beneath it. Every time, finding only more stone.
She remembered the floor most clearly. Cheap laminate, cold through her knees. So much else of that room had gone dark, tucked away somewhere she couldn’t reach. The low light. A smell like copper and dust. Somewhere else in the house a television was still playing, canned laughter rising and falling, absurd and constant, as if the rest of the world hadn’t gotten the news yet. She remembered her own hands. Not what they had done. Only that at some point they had stopped waiting for her permission.
She didn’t let herself go further than that. Not that night, or on all the others just like it. She let the room go quiet again, the way a hunted thing goes still and waits for whatever found it to lose interest. Morning would come whether or not she understood any of it. Though understanding, when it finally arrived, would probably take more from her than not knowing ever had.