[QCrit] Adult/Literary Speculative Fiction - Evergone (86K/First Attempt)
Hello! I'd love some feedback on my query letter. It's my first time querying so I want to know if it's well written and if it catches attention or if it's too plain, and any other recommendations you could give me.
Thanks a lot!
Dear [agency name],
I am writing to submit my novel, Evergone, for the attention of [agent’s name].
I'm querying [agent] specifically because I read [specific compatibility of my novel with the agent’s listed genres or interests].
Jessica Binley works at Evergone, the company that manages death. As a talent manager, she handles the new hires, turns panicked souls into functional reapers, and occasionally brings cinnamon rolls to quarterly audits. It isn’t glamorous, but she’s great at it. Then her mentor, Koba, retires without warning and leaves her a parting gift: a redacted incident report for a woman named Helena Pryce, who was taken sixty years before her expected time of death. Someone in the company stole a life, and Koba trusted Jessica to figure out why.
The investigation pulls in her boss, Goods, a man who had his grief surgically removed as a corporate sanction, and Alexa, a mortal woman across the hall, quietly running an illegal therapy practice for exhausted reapers out of her flat.
As they dig deeper, one early collection becomes three hundred and fifty-six. A secret professor, a physical archive that shouldn’t exist, and a watcher of time operating out of a video rental store all point toward a conspiracy at the heart of death itself. And then Goods visits the mother of Helena Pryce and hears her daughter described in two words: kind-hearted, idealistic. The exact words in Jessica’s own employee file.
She has been holding her own case all along.
Evergone is a literary speculative fiction novel of around 85K words, in the vein of The Ministry of Time, The Midnight Library, and The Thursday Murder Club. It is the first book in a planned trilogy, but it works as a standalone as well.
I am a banker writing under the pen name JP Billinghurst. Evergone is my first novel, the product of twenty years of writing for the love of it and one very specific year of meaning it.
Thank you all for your time and consideration. As requested, I have attached a synopsis and the full novel for your review.
Yours sincerely,