Query Letter: Twentymile: A Daring Thriller in a Remote, Dangerous Setting

Twentymile, C. Matt Smith’s expertly crafted debut, pits a lone tough-as-nails park service investigator against killer survivalist wingnuts in the wilderness during a snowstorm. It’s an ambitious and terrifying premise and, man, does he pull it off. The story starts out slow-burn and suddenly switches to frightening page turner. In between the action, Smith uses flashbacks to flesh out both the badass main character and her demented but never one-dimensional foe. You can check out the book that Foreword Reviews calls “a disturbing potent thriller” here.

Smith was kind enough to share the query that got him an offer from Latah Books, without an agent. I want to highlight this because not everyone knows there are publishers that take unagented submissions. I similarly submitted my debut directly to Crooked Lane. Agents can do amazing things for you, but direct submissions are also an option.  You can read Smith’s query here:

Dear Jon: I write to query the interest of Latah Books in Twentymile, a novel of murder and survival set in the Great Smoky Mountains. Latah's offerings display a joint emphasis on quality writing and reverence for our natural world. I'd like to think Twentymile fits that bill as well. While the Appalachian Mountains are not the intermountain west, still there is plenty of beauty and complexity to chew on in those hills.

When wildlife biologist Alex Lowe is found face-down in Twentymile Creek inside Great Smoky Mountains National Park, it looks on the surface like a suicide. But Tsula Walker, Special Agent with the National Park Service’s Investigative Services Branch, isn’t so sure. The deeper she digs, the more she comes to question the easy conclusion.

The rest of Tsula’s life is no simpler. Her wildlife poaching sting inside Everglades National Park has gone unexpectedly sideways. Her mother has cancer and is refusing any further treatment. And a local politician is trying to drag her into a land dispute between the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians to which she belongs and the Park Service that pays her salary.

Her investigation of Alex’s death takes her deep into Great Smoky Mountains, where she comes face-to-face with the lethal Harlan Miles. Harlan has led a group of four men, including his own two sons, on a mission to reclaim a homestead that was taken from his family when park was established in the 1930s. This encounter between the law and the lawless explodes in violence, and Tsula finds herself fighting for survival--not only from the men who would do her harm, but from a looming winter storm that could prove just as deadly.

Twentymile (78,000 words) is a crime novel. But like Deep Fire Rise (excellent), David Joy’s When These Mountains Burn, or Peter Heller's The River, its ambitions run deeper than its genre surface. Told from multiple interwoven points of view, the novel trains its lens on the characters at its heart and how they came to this deadly intersection. It also explores the many meanings attached to this one majestic place--Cherokee ancestral home; land of opportunity for white settlers; crown jewel in the U.S. public lands experiment--and the conflicts that can arise from such a complicated history.

I am an attorney practicing in Atlanta and an avid outdoorsman. I discovered the Smoky Mountains when I attended college in North Carolina, and part of my heart has never left them. This is my first novel, but my short fiction has appeared online for Mystery Tribune.

Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

C. Matthew Smith

Query Letter: Dark Things I Adore: A Totally Original, Addictive Art-Related Mystery

I have a soft spot for books that combine art and murder (I wrote one after all).  Katie Lattari’s Dark Things I Adore (originally called The Agony Record) is at the top of my list.  Serious, I cannot include enough superlatives about this mesmerizing book.  If I ever meet Lattari in person, I hope I’m sober, or I might rave at her like a teenaged Swiftie at a rock concert… sorry, you get the picture.

The book starts off with Audra, a beautiful, brilliant art student, and her narcissistic horndog teacher driving to Audra’s country house to “look at her paintings.” Teacher thinks he’s in for the sweetest kind of sucking up. But student has something much darker in mind. The story also cuts back and forth to a bohemian artist colony from a generation earlier. Over time, the link between the two plot lines becomes clear. Do yourself a favor and pick up your copy here.

Lattari shared a spoiler redacted version of her query letter.  I’m reposting this pitch from her website, which also contains a ton of interesting information and tips for new and querying writers.  

Dear Sarah,

I’m currently seeking representation for my 85,000-word novel, The Agony Record, an engrossing multiple-POV thriller set in the northern wilds of Maine. The Agony Record is a book that could sit comfortably on a reading list with works like Peter Swanson’s The Kind Worth Killing, Tana French's In The Woods, Gabriel Tallent's My Absolute Darling, and Fiona Barton’s The Child. It's a thriller that puts women at its forefront and which works with themes surrounding the unlikely solidarities that can form around trauma.

It’s mid-October in New England. Lovers Audra Colfax and Max Durant have decided to escape the bustling streets of Boston to weekend at Audra’s family home on the shore of Moosehead Lake in Rockveil, Maine. Twenty-eight-year-old Audra is the star student in the Painting M.F.A. program at the Boston Institute for the Visual Arts, and forty-nine-year-old Max is her professor, mentor and thesis advisor there. For nearly a year the two have indulged in the exquisite pleasures of secrets – secrets both withheld from one another and forged together. And while Max believes their relationship to be born of mutual artistic admiration and erotic passion, it’s a misapprehension that may prove deadly. [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS]

What comes to light, chapter by chapter, [REDACTED FOR SPOILERS]...Told from the alternating perspectives of Audra, Max, Audra’s mother’s diary, and Max’s wife, The Agony Record reveals the deep, deadly, interconnected secrets of four people across nearly three decades.

I hold a B.A. in English (2009) and an M.A. in English (2011) from the University of Maine and an M.F.A. in Fiction Writing/Prose from the University of Notre Dame (2013). In 2016 my debut novel American Vaudeville – a small-press literary novel – was published by Mammoth Books. I have had short stories published in The Writing Disorder, Pennsylvania English, Cabildo Quarterly, and NOO Journal, among others. In 2016 my short horror story “No Protections, Only Powers” was a Top 20 Finalist in the NeoVerse short story competition and was anthologized in the book Threads: A NeoVerse Anthology.

The book is complete and available for review upon request. This is a simultaneous agent submission. Per your submission guidelines, I have pasted the first ten (10) pages of the manuscript below.

I appreciate your time and consideration, and all best,

Katie Lattari

Query Letter: The Lady Upstairs: A Darkly Feminist Noir

Halley Sutton has been on my TBR list since I saw her talking about noir and sounding like a boss at Bouchercon 2023.  The Lady Upstairs, her deep dark debut, was on Crimereads “best psychological thrillers” list.  PopSugar called it one of the most exciting books of Fall 2020, and Kirkus proclaimed it “sizzling.”  The story centers on a woman who earns her living blackmailing heinous men until one of her targets is killed and things take a frightening turn.  

You can order a copy of the novel BookTrib said is “crackling with wit and style” here.  (Next up on your reading list, Sutton’s bestselling thriller, The Hurricane Blond).

Sutton was kind enough for share the query for The Lady Upstairs, which also went through the PitchWars mentoring process in 2018. I don’t have any experience with Pitchwars, but it sounds like a wonderful resource and so far, several incredible writers tell me it helped launch their careers (I hope to include more on this later). Sutton's pitch:

Jo’s made a career out of ruining terrible men. She works for a woman known only as the Lady Upstairs, recruiting girls to seduce and blackmail the richest sexist pigs in Los Angeles. But if Jo doesn’t ace her next case—using the charms of a naïve blonde named Ellen to take down a notorious casting-couch king—the Lady’s threatening to replace her.

Jo thinks she has it handled. Sure, Ellen’s getting squirrelly, but it’s nothing that can’t be solved by stealing a little extra bribe money from the Lady’s stash. Jo’s sure as hell not going back to her old life—or leaving the woman she can’t quite admit she loves, her coworker Lou. 

Before long, though, Jo’s bad decisions have a body count, and the cops are closing in on the Lady’s whole operation. Jo hatches one more scheme: swindling a powerful local politician, then using his cash to skip town with Lou. But Lou’s been keeping secrets of her own, and not just about the identity of their mysterious employer.

THE LADY UPSTAIRS is a modern-day feminist noir novel with a femme fatale heroine, perfect for fans of SUNBURN by Laura Lippman and Megan Abbott’s QUEENPIN. The manuscript is complete at 85,000 words, and it’s a standalone with series potential.

I wrote THE LADY UPSTAIRS while completing my MFA at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. I currently work in academic publishing, and I’m also a fiction editor for the Monday Night Lit literary magazine and a 2018 Pitch Wars mentee.

Please find the manuscript attached. Thank you for requesting to read more, and thank you for your time!