Successful Queries: Tracy Bernstein and “A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer,” by Maxie Dara
The best way to learn how to write a successful query is to read one. In this installment, find a query letter to editor Tracy Bernstein for Maxie Dara’s book, A Grim Reaper’s Guide to Catching a Killer (Berkley).
Welcome back to the Successful Queries series. In this installment, find the query letter pitched to Tracy Bernstein for Maxie Dara's book A Grim Reaper's Guide to Catching a Killer, recently published by Berkley.
Maxie Dara is a writer and actor from Ontario, Canada. She has been a freelance journalist focusing on the local arts and culture scene for more than five years, with bylines in publications such as Hamilton Magazine and Beyond James, among others. She is also a two-time award-winning playwright, taking home the Best of Fringe award at the 2017 Hamilton Fringe Festival for the musical comedy This Is Not a Musical: The Musical! and the 2020 Torpedo Prize for her play Alone Together, a pandemic drama.
Maxie knew she wanted to be a writer at the age of seven, when she first fell in love with the written word. She also wanted to be a mermaid but has mostly focused on the writing side of things.
Here's her original query:
Sometimes it takes working with the dead to start truly living.
KATHY VALENCE is 42, mid-divorce, and pregnant with her ex’s baby. She’s also a modern-day grim reaper, but frankly that’s the easiest part of her life right now. Or at least it was, until one of her clients’ souls went missing.
When she finally tracks down 17-year-old CONNER ORTIZ, he’s dead, angsty and blames Kathy for both. According to Conner, someone at S.C.Y.T.H.E. (Secure Collection, Yielding, and Transportation of Human Essences) took his life instead of just his soul. And only Kathy has the necessary resources to find out who, and why. One wrong move on this case could cost Kathy her job, not to mention her patience, or even her life.
Now, with only 90 days to figure out what happened to Conner and help him move on, Kathy is forced to rely on the help of her ex-husband and Conner himself before the boy’s soul becomes stuck on Earth as a ghost forever. And before Kathy becomes what she’s always feared most: the nobody she used to be before she became Grim.
A humorous murder mystery, GRIM, complete at 80,000 words, has the dark comedic flavours of Christopher Moore’s Grim Reaper series and a similar sense of heart and themes of found family as The House in the Cerulean Sea by T.J. Klune
Check out Maxie Dara's A Grim Reaper's Guide to Catching a Killer here:
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What drew Editor Tracy Bernstein to the query:
The “elevator pitch”—grim reaper must solve a murder—leapt out and captured me immediately; I thought it was so funny and original. At the same time, the query was written with both the humor and the sweetness the story promised (and delivered—wow, did it deliver!!).
The letter also highlighted two themes I find particularly appealing: self-exploration and found family. All in all, the query was irresistible, as is the finished book!
*****
Tracy Bernstein (she/her) has worked at publishers large and small including Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt, Pocket Books and Kensington. She joined NAL/Berkley in 2002 with a focus on nonfiction and memoir but now concentrates on fiction, primarily mysteries and suspense of many varieties. In addition, she edits the Signet Classics line and oversees the extensive Berkley backlist. Her New York Times-bestselling authors include Jen Lancaster, Fiona Barton, Montel Williams, and Scott Hamilton.
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