Letters from the Dead

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. (May)