I did one back in may (when looking at unicorn tanks started my bookmarks folder for the novel), but it seems to be about a novel I shall never write now. Writing the back cover blurb before you have any idea about the characters is amusingly silly :) I do remain fond of the line: "That's what I always believed, until I heard the stories: a woman in the city, who can make the dead speak, who leans over the newly deceased and listens to the tales their bodies tell her. "
As for the blurb proper ...
Here is the short version: "An apprentice coroner in the Kingdom has to survive his employer, investigating the deaths of dragons, zombies, and royalty, and various people who want to kill him for being too good at his job. All Adwyn wants is to not end up being the subject of an autopsy, and to go home and tell his father that his character-building advice really sucked."
And the long version:
"There are many things that make someone a man: being shipped off to the capital of the Kingdom to be a coroner is probably not one of them most people would think of. Dealing with a boss who goes through apprentices like the king goes through food tasters is almost as bad as being dragged about to see dead bodies as she stares at you the same way she looks at corpses, waiting for something she never names.
Throw in the hangman's beautiful daughter, dead dragons, zombies that have to be questioned to find out how they died, dead princesses, other royal deaths and more suspects than anyone would like to think about and you have what may be the worst apprenticeship in the dubious history of coroners in the Kingdom, especially when people decide you're too good at your job.
Adwyn hadn't been sure what to expect when his father packed him off to the city, but having people try and murder him for doing too good a job hadn't been on the agenda. If he survived, he was definitely going home and and giving his father a long lecture on the dangers of being the best that you can be. But, really, he'd settle for not being a corpse his mentor gets to perform an autopsy on, if that's not too much to hope for?"
And, after November is done, I shall see how close to the novel it really was :)
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