The Katana Awards [Closed for Judging]

▬ιMYSTERY/THRILLER RESULTS═ﺤ

.・。.・゜✭・.・✫・゜・。.

The results of the mystery/thriller genre are here!

Please do take the time to thank your judge, pixelmum! They've put a lot of effort into judging all the books!

And of course, to the participants, thank you for being a part of the awards!

A NOTE FROM THE JUDGE

 All of these books were awesome and it was tough to give scores since I love different aspects of all of these stories. To be honest, things like grammar and covers and blurbs don't really come high on my list of priorities as long as a book has a great premise or conflict. I am just a hobby writer but a native English speaker and a technical writer in my day job, so if I need to explain my reviews below better, please DM me. I'd love to help if I can! Congratulations to all of you for writing high-calibre books that really were a delight for me to read. 

⚔️

PETA Bomb by Jezebel93 

Cover – 5/5

As long as a cover is interesting and legible, (and bonus points if there's a cute lady) I'm happy. Your name is hard to make out, so maybe add some fading behind it to increase the contrast. I have no idea why she has wings, but who knows? Maybe she'll sprout these in the book.

Blurb - 4/5

Mostly all good here, just that you need to refer to Steve as Sara's boyfriend in the first sentence, otherwise it reads like some rando called Steve is pulling the strings. Also, the final sentence doesn't make sense since the clauses are not opposite, so there is no hook. You have two clauses that are good/good for Sara: "With sparks flying between her and Devin (good), she'd better enjoy her exciting life while she can (good)". It needs to be something good/bad or bad/good for the reader to get hooked by an interesting challenge or conflict of some kind. Something like "When her handsome new police officer boyfriend is caught in Steve's crosshairs (bad), Sara had better enjoy her exciting life while she can (good)."

Writing Style – 7/10

Your writing style is super, but the issue is that the story is not proceeding in a temporally logical fashion. While their book has a few sentences that don't fit temporally here and there, in your case the entire first chapter threw me since it's not actually in the same timeline as the rest of the book. Sara was crying because of a medical procedure, so I thought she was in a hospital, then she was in a dungeon, then there were these two jokey characters who seemed kind of like bungling idiots, then there was mention of Devin, and I didn't know who that was. I basically had no idea what was going on. Readers may just put the book down because they are confused. 

I appreciate that you wanted all this backstory to be there for the first chapter, but I think it would be more effective if you start the story with Chapter 2, and give the reader the same memories as Sara - i.e. none, and then sprinkle in the backstory from Chapter 1 elsewhere in the book. This technique has a nickname: come late, leave early. It means that all this barrage of information about what happened to Sara gets drip-fed to the reader where relevant in the plot, and not all given in one dump at the beginning.

Grammar– 9/10

Your grammar and punctuation are great, and as I mentioned in the review above, I'm not that bothered about that copy-edit stuff anyway. The only niggle is that there is a lot of "he said" as a dialogue tag. You don't even need dialogue tags in most cases since your action beats are so good, so you could omit a lot of the "he said"s and it would be clear who is talking anyway. The read would flow better, your prose will be sharper, and your word count will drop.