Avery McShane - A Sneak Peek

By now you know that I recently signed my first book deal. I'm not exactly sure when it will be published, but at least I know it will be. I talked to my new publisher and they agreed that I could give you an idea what the book is about. I thought that the best way to do this would be to post my original query letter. This is the one that piqued the interest of my new editor and eventually led to the contract. I toyed with the idea of doling it out in several posts, but ultimately decided that it wouldn't flow too well - so you get the whole thing in one shot. It is written in first person by the young protagonist in the story. Enjoy.

"My name is Avery McShane. I lived most of my growing up years in Campo Mata, smack dab in the middle-of-nowhere Venezuela.  Our oil camp was surrounded by El Monte, what most folks call the jungle. Back in the sixties, at least where we lived, we didn’t have TV. So most everything we did to have fun had something to do with El Monte and mostly it started at our tree house high up in the branches of a huge mango tree. Billy and Todd made up the rest of our super exclusive, no-girls-allowed-ever club called the Machacas, and our clubhouse was in that tree.

It all started when we went to sneak a peek at the dead body they’d just put on the concrete slab around back of the clinic. He was a young Venezuelan gaucho, a cowboy, who had been shot twice right through the heart; not nearly as gross as the guy who got smushed by all the drill pipe the week before, just two half-dollar spots of blood on his denim shirt. We didn’t make much of it until I saw the dead guy’s missing silver spurs at Pablo Malo’s banana farm a few days later. From then on things got a mite out of control.

That’s when Pablo Malo caught us trespassin’ and shot Todd in the butt with his shotgun full of rock salt and his demon dog, Loca came after Billy and me with her nasty fangs. We all got the heck out of Dodge and back safe to our tree house in El Monte, but we knew it wasn’t over. Then I found the note from Pablo Malo in my bedroom; “Next time no salt…” Guess he didn’t want us messing around in his business. Following day, at the hideout, we found all our comic books ripped to pieces and all our most prized possessions smashed and broken. Well, that was about it. He’d dealt the cards and we were going to play the hand he’d dealt - this was war.

After that things got blown up, folks got kidnapped, and there was a heckuva lot more gun play; just like in my favorite western novels. ‘Course we had to deal with the flood, gators, anacondas and other critters too. When the dust got settled, we’d figured out what happened to the dead guy on the concrete slab and a whole lot more that came out in the wash. Looking back, it was a pretty cool adventure, so that’s why I’ve told the story."