Preacher's Blood query attempt

[Preacher]

Gavin Preacher's little sister has been missing for thirty days. After a tireless search, Gavin is left with a sleeping problem, a candy addiction, a wall full of yellow Post-its, and no clues or witnesses. Then a woman shows up at his job. She says that Sara is alive and she needs his help. When he presses for more information she flees to the roof in a fit of fear and paranoia. Gavin follows and the woman babbles about "them" coming for her and jumps off the roof, leaving him with her change purse and the words "start with me."

Inside the change purse in an apartment key. Gavin searches the woman's apartment and finds a name jumbled up in a bunch of Google searches. He traces the name and finds a woman who recently had a baby and died in a paranoid fit. He traces her, his sister, and the jumper to a fertility clinic, which is rumored to be using a dangerous experimental therapy. Knowing how desperate Sara had been to have a baby, Gavin sets off to the dark, eerie woods of the Jersey Pine Barrens to find her before her quest to have a baby kills her. What he finds is much worse, and scarier, than he could have ever imagined.

[wilderness]

Hi Preacher,

You've given us a good sense of the plot. However, right now the query feels like too much of a synopsis, IMO. You've got a lot of plot details, but I think you need to actually scale back and concentrate more on the character, why he is the only one who can search for his sister, and try to insert some voice into the query. Notes below. Hope this helps!

Gavin Preacher's little sister has been missing for thirty days. After a tireless search, Gavin is left with a sleeping problem, a candy addiction, a wall full of yellow Post-its, and no clues or witnesses. Then a woman shows up at his job. Before this, I thought maybe Gavin was a teen because of the candy addiction and because his little sister was kidnapped. How old are Gavin and his sister? What happened to her, and why is Gavin the only one searching? She says that Sara (you never previously told us that Sara is his sister, so we have to infer what you mean) is alive and she needs his help. When he presses for more information she flees to the roof in a fit of fear and paranoia. Change of perspective -- Gavin doesn't know why she fled. Gavin follows and the woman babbles about "them" coming for her and jumps off the roof, leaving him with her change purse and the words "start with me." This is too much detail about a single scene for a query. It feels like summary.

Inside the change purse in an apartment key. Gavin searches the woman's apartment and finds a name jumbled up in a bunch of Google searches. He traces the name and finds a woman who recently had a baby and died in a paranoid fit. He traces her, his sister, and the jumper to a fertility clinic, which is rumored to be using a dangerous experimental therapy. Knowing how desperate Sara had been to have a baby, Gavin sets off to the dark, eerie woods of the Jersey Pine Barrens to find her before her quest to have a baby kills her. What he finds is much worse, and scarier, than he could have ever imagined. You've totally lost me in character soup. All this info should be in the synopsis. In a query, concentrate on just the first few chapters. Introduce your MC and the goal/motivation/conflict. Read a lot of query shark to get an idea of the types of things that work and don't work in a query. Good luck!