Vox Hunt: A Work In Progress

It's not so much something I've been working on, but something I've been avoiding working on today.  Now that I've completed a polished draft of my science fiction novel, I need to write a synopsis, so that I can sub the book to agents and publishers.  The thing about synopses of books--they're cheesy.  They're the lowest level of Reader's Digest condensing.  In this case, a 500+ page novel condensed to two pages.

Synoppic

The first draft started like this:
In a city where violent death is a daily occurrence, people of Stermil are hardly surprised when girls begin washing up dead in the river, their throats cut.  The only difference in the killings is that the government has not sanctioned the girls’ deaths.  An armed and fortified city, Stermil is divided by religion, ruled by a brutal governor, and policed by foreign mercenaries.  A class system confines and isolates families descended from a rebel faction that defied the Governor more than a hundred years before.

Ugh.  It sounds like a book jacket, which is not the goal of a synopsis. 

So I want to add some real darkness, some undertone of the inherent evil of humanity.  Maybe start with something like:
Killing one person is murder; killing a thousand is a job.

Then there's the rest of the story line--a little detail, but not too much.  It's a fine line.

Afraid of being a political pawn in another marriage negotiation, TSETGAR flees from her father’s house in Gehalt.  With her, she takes her daughter, KATSRIM, who is of mixed race, and who has never been accepted in her mother’s culture.  Finding work as a nurse for the ailing matriarch of Gri House, a rebel family, Tsetgar and Katsrim are on the wrong side of a dangerous line in Stermil.  In Gri House is a baby born alive, but without a spirit, and late at night, threatening men visit DARSET, the head of Gri House.  Even as she tries to make friends in Stermil, Katsrim watches in alarm as her mother falls in love with BITLA, a young woman who is part of the Gri family.

OASI, a lieutenant in the mercenary force, is called upon to retrieve each body and silence the rumors that swirl around the murders.  With every girl who dies, another rebel family finds themselves at risk of dying for an old enmity with the Governor.  Wanting to put a stop to the murders, Oasi begins his own investigation and finds himself in an awkward position: a killer-for-hire, trying to find a murderer the Governor doesn’t want found.  The mercenaries are the remnants of the Pelumi culture, shattered by forty years of war with Gehalt.  Despite lingering hatred for her mother’s people, Oasi is drawn to Katsrim after he discovers she is also half Pelumi.

Now it's starting to cook a little, but it still seems too heavy on bland exposition.  I mean, exposition, sure I gotta have, but it seems bland.

It's a complicated story, made more complicated by taking place in a foreign culture.  There's too much to follow, too many people.  The book itself perhaps has this problem, but then it's got 500+ pages to unfold what I've got to do here in 2-3 pages.  From there, the whole story line has to unfold--there are no secrets in a synopsis. 

This is the make or break--what an agent uses to decide if he/she wants to represent the book. 

No wonder I've been avoiding it.