New Query and Opening!

Hey crowd!

Well, as you probably know, I'm part of a competition called 'The Writer's Voice', and if you read the comments on my entry, you'll see that I did get picked for Team Brenda! Team Brenda is the best! Brenda Drake is the greatest, too. She gave me the most honest appraisal of my work, and I am so grateful. She's asked me to try rewriting Mad As A Hatter from a single POV: that of my fourteen-year-old main character, Emil. While I'm not quite done the process, I have finished the first 250, and with a little adjustment to my query my entry is now up on Brenda's blog!

If you don't want to go all that way to see my entry, though, it's right here.

Title: MAD AS A HATTER
Genre: YA Thriller
Word Count: 60,000

Query:

London, 1882.

Seven years ago, Emil Aleric and his sister were kidnapped and taken to ‘Wonderland’ by a man claiming to come from the future. He called himself the Hatter. Emil survived the torture. His sister didn't.

When Emil hears of a serial killer ravaging London and leaving notes quoting Alice in Wonderland, Emil knows his former abductor has returned. And when his guardian, Inspector Corwin James, is put in charge of the case, he thinks it must be fate.

At first, Corwin's adamant that Emil have nothing to do with the case; after all, he’s only fourteen. However, as the two come closer to learning the truth of the murders, they find the most pivotal clues lie in Emil’s memories—suppressed for seven years, but now threatening to consume him. Now Emil must fight the Hatter again, but this time, if he fails, time itself could end.

Excerpt:

From the warm floor of his sitting room, Emil Aleric glared out the window. It was late afternoon, and the crisp wind had left the streets of Belgravia empty, save for a couple climbing out of a carriage, followed by a butler carrying a dozen gifts. Probably some last minute Christmas shopping.

Emil scowled. He hated happy families.

The fourteen-year-old future Viscount looked away from the window, took a gulp of Earl Grey, and winced. He’d always thought the tea was some disguised form of dishwater, but every adult he knew drank it, and his mother said it was an acquired taste. He forced himself to take another sip, and looked down at the table in front of him. 

One, two, three newspapers lay strewn across the mahogany table. The first newspaper was flipped to the obituaries, where a small paragraph about a girl named Daphne Bell could be found. It was only a few lines, something about her family and “may He bless her immortal soul”, or some such rubbish.

She had been the first to die.

Three days after going missing, she’d apparently fallen from the top floor of the twentieth building on a wealthy street around Kensington Gardens. Her body was spread across the ground, bashed up and bloody, with glass protruding from her body at the oddest angles.

The funny thing was, all the windows on that street were perfectly intact.