This week's assignment for Kris Neri's class is writing the
dust jacket blurb. In her lecture, Kris gives a number of examples and points
out that all good blurbs contain the following elements:

• Introduction
• Triggering action
• Complication
• Hook

Here's the dust jacket blurb that I wrote for Regulated
for Murder:

June 1771. Townsfolk of Hillsborough, North Carolina were
shaken by the executions of six men: ordinary citizens hanged by order of Royal
Governor Tryon for their participation in the Regulator Rebellion. When the
tumult settled, and the bodies were buried in a location known only to
officials, a young man and his sweetheart had vanished from town. Those who
knew the couple presumed that they'd eloped.

Bearing a dispatch from his commander in coastal Wilmington,
British Lieutenant Michael Stoddard arrives in heavily-Patriot Hillsborough in
early February 1781, his red coat swapped for civilian garb to conceal his
identity. He expects to hand the letter to a courier from Lord Cornwallis, then
head back to Wilmington the next day. Instead, he's greeted by the courier's
freshly murdered corpse, a chilling trail of clues that leads him back to the
Regulators' execution ten years earlier, and his nemesis, the brutal, cunning
Lieutenant Dunstan Fairfax, who suspects him of treason against King George the
Third.

Since I haven't yet started writing the first draft, I
cannot say for sure that the above reflects exactly what's going to happen.
Somewhere in the first quarter of the draft, my characters will take over; I'll
get out of the way so they can tell the story, and that always leads to
unforeseen but delightful plot twists. But fortunately, the blurb at this point
isn't set in stone. Its purpose is to give me a point on the horizon to head
for.

By the way, here's the root story from last week's
assignment. I forgot to post it in the flurry of snowflakes:

Will a villain who concealed evidence of his act of murder
among men executed by Royal Governor Tryon after the Regulator Rebellion ten
years earlier get away with his crime in the past as well as the murder of a
present-day message courier for General Cornwallis and Major Craig? Or will
Michael Stoddard, Major Craig's investigator in Wilmington, North Carolina,
recognize the connection between the murders in 1771 and 1781, uncover the
secret the villain is hiding, and bring him to justice?