Letters from the Dead
A Novel
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3.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
Epic and atmospheric, this addictive debut novel takes us into an intoxicating world of old money, privilege, and family intrigue as a young heiress must return home from a decade-long exile to face the powerful enemies arrayed against her, including those within her own family.
For the first eleven years of her life, the precocious daughter of a great European family tracing its roots back more than fifteen generations never set foot on land that her family didn’t own. Cloistered on a sprawling estate in the Alpine foothills, as the youngest sibling of her generation she has little knowledge of the dark forces gathering to strike at her family. But, when her insatiable curiosity leads her to uncover a priceless text hidden hundreds of years before, she shines light into corners meant to be left in the dark and threatens to uncover secrets that could trigger an internecine battle for succession.
Then, with no warning or explanation, she is whisked away on a private jet and exiled to an elite but isolated all-girls boarding school in the United States. More than a decade later, now in her twenties, she finds her bank accounts abruptly frozen and is recalled from her affluent but empty existence abroad. Little does she know that her family has plans for her, including an arranged marriage. Worse, as she draws closer to discovering the horrific act that sent her into exile a decade before, and shadowy enemies close in on her family, she must face her most dangerous and powerful foe: her own father.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An heiress sets out to learn her family's dark secrets in this mesmerizing debut from the pseudonymous Valeri. As the story begins, the unnamed 11-year-old protagonist has never left her family's vast estate near the Swiss-Austrian border. Though it's 1992, no pop culture permeates the estate's walls. Instead, the family is waited on hand and foot, their main conflicts coming from the eldest son, Augustin, who senses that his grandfather prefers his sister to him as the future inheritor of the family's business interests. She fumbles her inheritance, however, when she lets her curiosity get the better of her and opens a forbidden text that seems to explain how her family has maintained power in Europe since the 18th century. Her father catches her before she can read anything too sensitive, but the girl is first exiled to a Connecticut boarding school, then a New York City university, where she tries to hold her own against ruthless American blue bloods. Then, almost out of nowhere, she's called back home after more than a decade away, and she grows determined to unearth what her father was trying to hide all those years ago. Valeri exhibits a formidable control of tone and mood, casting the action in near allegorical shades while maintaining taut suspense. Readers will eagerly await the sequel.
