Critique for Farrell-Kinderson Ch. 1

For @Farrell-Kinderson, The Royal Dead Ringer
Chapter 1

•Good job on jumping straight into the story.  You didn't beat around the bush and from the very first sentence you had me hooked.

•The dialogue (mainly its punctuation) needs a little bit of work.  It's a minor thing, but proper punctuation makes a good impact and makes a story look neater, for lack of a better word.  Each phrase that doesn't end in a question or exclamation mark should end with a comma if there is a dialogue tag (which should not be capitalized unless it's a name) following it.  For example: ["Hello" she said."]  must be written as ["Hello," she said.]

•Also, there are many run-on sentences that could fixed by replacing commas with periods.  I find it helps to read your work out loud to find mistakes like that.

•I like your descriptions, but sometimes less is more, as they say.  The writing can start to seem too backlogged and it can slow down the flow of the story.  Is every detail required?  Could some be omitted?  Are some repeated but simply in different words?  Could you break it up into smaller pieces and spread it through the rest of the story?

•I'd recommend to try and break up some paragraphs into smaller parts, since smaller paragraphs are usually easier to read than big blocks of text.

•Overall, your writing is very pretty and you have a good vocabulary while not throwing it in your readers' faces.  Well done :)  It flows well and you language/voice is impressive. Just be careful about your tenses, sometimes you switch between past and present.

•I have to say, though, I was immensely confused throughout the whole chapter.  I understand that it's only the first, and leaving your readers with questions is good, but not to the point where they have no idea what's going on.  From what I understood, Raya is a queen of some kingdom (what kingdom?) and it seems like this is a world where vampires have dominion over humans (?) and she's making a deal with George (?) though I don't know who he is.  Remember that your readers aren't you, so this is their first look at this world you've created, some explanation, even a sentence or too, would be very helpful.  Otherwise some readers may get discouraged.

•Anyway, really well done. :) I hope you found this helpful, and if you have any questions please PM me.