The Writer’s Voice Query + 250

I’m so excited to enter my YA romantic suspense, Shatter, into The Writer’s Voice contest!  Here are my query and the first 250 words of the novel.  Enjoy.

High-school-nobody Salem Jefferson is sure that her sister Carrie was murdered, but no one believes her. When her class puts a JFK conspiracy theory on mock trial, Salem discovers her popular classmates’ dark secrets and unravels the real-life conspiracy behind Carrie’s death.

Salem joins the mock trial class and enters a world of cunning, weapon-packing students, nearly all of whom are hostile to her.   Perhaps it’s because she takes sides so quickly in the ongoing clash between gang-banger Cordero and heart-throb Slate. Salem sticks close to both, suspecting that a student had something to do with the gang symbol tagged on Carrie’s car before she died.  No teen will come clean to Salem, though. The town leaders who volunteer to take part in the mock trial aren’t talking either. Then another body is found, this one buried in her family’s orchard and tagged with the same symbol. Salem’s dad is suspected of murder, and Salem launches an investigation of her own, crashing into a secret that could get her killed just like Carrie—because one of the boys has been lying to her from the beginning. And it might not be the one she suspects.

Shatter won first place in the League of Utah Writers YA manuscript category. I have taught teens for three years and am a published short-story author.

Shatter

Kiss a guy?

I’d had sushi once, which felt like eating a pair of lips.  I assumed kissing would be similar only without the ginger and wasabi sauce.

Did I want to kiss a guy?  Ginger and wasabi sauce were the only good parts of sushi.

Still, I didn’t interrupt my sister as she instructed me over the phone on how to live my life that April morning.  I never corrected her when she told me how to live my life, even though she was only a year older than me.  Carrie was the one person who thought I would turn out normal.  Like, mentally stable.  I knew I didn’t act right.  I wasn’t certain what that meant about me being normal. But around Carrie it didn’t matter because I could pretend.

Carrie, with her big laugh, and her big plans, and her persuasive ability to see big plans through.  She was the lifeline I clung to, floating into touches of normal life, to pajama dance parties and pickle-eating contests and triple dares to run in just our bras around the barn, as if anyone was ever in the peach orchard.

I didn’t know my lifeline was so fragile, so thin.

I never considered there could be people out in the orchard.  Sometimes.  Dangerous people.

I never thought Carrie was a string that could be cut.

“You need to get out there more.  Talk.  Kiss a guy,” she was telling me over the phone.