Revised Query Letter

OK, here is the revised query based on your suggestions. Thank you very much! By the way, my process with queries is that I usually solicit feedback from a couple of different places (in this case I posted it on VerlaKay.com as well), then I take the feedback and just think on it for a little while. Walk the dog, go food shopping, something like that. Then usually while I'm in Aisle Seven, staring at cans of tuna fish, I'll have an A-ha! moment and realize how I can fix the query. Finally, I cut and paste the feedback into my query document and as I go along making changes, I check off what I've fixed. I don't always make every change that is suggested, but in this case, I pretty much did.

And if that process seems relatively straightforward, understand that there was much gnashing of teeth and yelling at the computer along the way.

So, here it is:

Sixteen-year-old Justine Kwiatkowski never planned on becoming a modern day King Arthur, she’s always preferred a good brawl to a sword fight and she’s got finals to worry about at the end of the month. But when her best friend Gwen is kidnapped outside the town of Avalon, she’ll do whatever it takes to get her back, even if it means questioning suspects, believing in magic, and pulling a sword out of a stone, even if it means risking her life by picking a fight with Morgan le Fay.

Because her best friend happens to be the reincarnation of Guinevere, and fifteen hundred years after the fall of Camelot, the Knights of the Round Table have returned, reborn as New Jersey teens. Now Morgan le Fay, with a little assist from Mordred, is killing the knights before they can remember who they were, kidnapping Gwen to draw out the last few survivors.

Not that Justine believes any of this is real. Reincarnation? Magic? She’s not a knight, she just wants her friend back. Making the connection between Gwen’s kidnapping and the murders of bright and promising area teens, she investigates the teens’ deaths, discovering the secret of who they once were and racing to track down the rest before they become the next victims.

She’s helped along the way by Gwen’s boyfriend, a loner from the wrong side of the tracks searching for redemption. Justine doesn’t know if she can trust him, especially when he claims to be Lancelot du Lac, but after she’s attacked by the Green Knight and pulls Excalibur from a stone, she’s starting to think he might be on to something.

To save her best friend, Justine will have to bring together Lancelot and the other knights and defeat Mordred. For Justine, that’s not a problem, and she just might save the world in the process.

Knights of Avalon, a YA Urban Fantasy, is complete at 65,000 words. While intended to be a three-part series, the first book is stand alone. If interested, the manuscript is available upon request. Thank you for your consideration!