GUTGAA Pitch Contest #2 - Jane Doe

JANE DOE
near-future sci-fi
90,000 words
QUERY:

UNAT agent Sam Rose has been side-lined for the six months she’s cared for her drug addicted father. Now he’s in rehab and off her hands, she wants to get her career back on track and herself out of rural Alabama. To do that, she needs a case that’s more important that dealing with dead clones, and what could be better than a break-in at a government-funded lab?

But nothing is ever that easy and when a missing security guard is linked to an unidentified corpse found six months before she went missing, Sam realizes the case is far more complicated than she first thought.

Then her boss starts stalling her, an anti-clone doctor is demanding the return of his research, and the only person that has Sam’s back happens to be the name at the top of her suspect list. Somehow Sam must untangle all the threads and prevent the North American Commonwealth from being dragged into a war of oppression.

First 150 Words:

A roach scuttled across the bathroom counter. "If you take one more step, I'll kill you. I mean it!" Sam's voice hit a note even dogs would find painful. She edged out of the apartment’s tiny bathroom clutching her towel to her chest.

The cockroach continued towards her makeup case. Smashing it was out of the question; she'd wind up with bug guts all over. It fluttered its dark brown wings and settled into the seventy-five dollar lotion like it was a spa bath.

Enraged, Sam threw the bottle across the room. It thunked against the apartment's asthmatic swamp cooler. The roach limped away from the wreckage. "Go away. Just die already!" She rolled up the landlord's renewal notice and tried clubbing the pest. She could have been fanning it for all the good it did her. The roach, leaving a trail of jasmine scented lotion, dashed to her bed.