Over and over I have revised this query letter. As such, I think it's the quintessential query for A Love To Kill For.
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Dear [Agent],
A young woman must kill a fellow college student on behalf
of a mob family in order to save her father’s life.
Several years prior to the narrative, Alex O’Connor’s father
wrote an inflammatory article about one of the New York crime families, and the
Martellos kidnapped him for it. Since then, Alex has been “working off her
father’s debt”—she’s an assassin. Every kill keeps her father alive. Every kill
works toward his freedom.
Alex isn’t a thug—she doesn’t enjoy killing for the sake of
violence. Her only comfort in the job is that it’s quick. Get the job, recon
the mark, make the kill, dispose of evidence—and then get back to college
before anyone notices she’s been gone. Oh yeah, she’s a student at NYU, too.
But that simplicity is gone. The Martello family has a plot
to take over the business of a rival family, the Corellis. When Alex is given
her next manila folder, she expects it to be another fast job, but it’s not.
She’s to befriend the mark and kill him only when other hit men are in position
to dispose of other members of the Corelli family simultaneously. Her hit? A
fellow student at NYU, Mick Corelli. As if that didn’t break her “code” into
enough tiny pieces, throughout the process of befriending him under the guise
of being his math tutor, Mick finds her out, and steals her heart, as well.
When the Martellos finally send the kill order, can she
actually go through with it? Can she really kill Mick? And if she can’t, what
does that mean for her father?
What has been described by my crit group as a mix of Darkly Dreaming Dexter, Romeo and Juliet, and
The Godfather all in one, A LOVE TO
KILL FOR is a YA novel, complete at 57,000 words.
A Creative Writing major from Ohio Wesleyan University, I’ve
studied under Robert Olmstead, and I have also taken workshops with Linnea
Sinclair and bestselling YA author Cinda Williams Chima. When not writing, I
seek inspiration from scuba diving, friends, television, reading, tea, and cats
(not necessarily in that order).
Thank you for your time and interest, and I hope to hear
from you soon.
Sincerely,
Veronica Duff
[Phone # redacted]
[E-mail redacted]
[Address redacted]
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Any thoughts or suggestions?
