Dead Letters

Goodreads Description

Ava Antipova has her reasons for running away: a failing family vineyard, a romantic betrayal, a mercurial sister, an absent father, a mother slipping into dementia. In Paris, Ava renounces her terribly practical undergraduate degree, acquires a French boyfriend and a taste for much better wine, and erases her past. Two years later, she must return to upstate New York. Her twin sister, Zelda, is dead.

Even in a family of alcoholics, Zelda Antipova was the wild one, notorious for her mind games and destructive behavior. Stuck tending the vineyard and the girls increasingly unstable mother, Zelda was allegedly burned alive when she passed out in the barn with a lit cigarette. But Ava finds the official explanation a little too neat. A little too Zelda. Then she receives a cryptic message from her sister.

Just as Ava suspected, Zelda's playing one of her games. In fact, she's outdone herself, leaving a series of clues about her disappearance. With the police stuck on a red herring, Ava follows the trail laid just for her, thinking like her sister, keeping her secrets, immersing herself in Zelda's drama and her outlandish circle of friends and lovers. Along the way, Zelda forces her twin to confront their twisted history and the boy who broke Ava's heart. But why? Is Zelda trying to punish Ava for leaving, or to teach her a lesson? Or is she simply trying to write her own ending?

Featuring a colorful, raucous cast of characters, Caite Dolan-Leach's debut thriller takes readers on a literary scavenger hunt for clues concealed throughout the seemingly idyllic wine country, hidden in plain sight on social media, and buried at the heart of one tremendously dysfunctional, utterly unforgettable family.

My Review

What a strange bunch of characters I came across in this book! Ava, who is the main character, has a serious drinking problem and is a self confessed 25 year old alcoholic. From what we hear about Zelda, she too had a drinking problem, but added to that we learn that she was a recreational and prescription drug addict. Their mother, also an alcoholic, suffers from severe dementia and doesn't know who anyone is most of the time. And their father has issues of his own.

So, that's the starting point for this very different book, which I actually thoroughly enjoyed. I have read some reviews that refer to this book as a thriller, and I suppose that to a certain extent it is, but it's also a family saga / drama.

When Ava hears that her twin sister, who she hasn't spoken to in two years, has died in a fire, she's not convinced. Knowing her sister like she does, this could all just be an elaborate plan to get Ava back into town and back into her life. Ava and Zelda have been highly competitive since birth and so Ava isn't surprised to learn that her sister has set up a game for her to play - she needs to decipher a number of clues to uncover what her sister is trying to tell her, and to lead her to where she is.

I loved the premise of this book, and the concept of having to unravel a system of clues using the letters of the alphabet, was very clever. I did think that some of the clues were fairly random though, and I'm not sure that I would have been able to unravel them if I was Ava, but I still enjoyed reading about how she figured them out.

This is more of a character driven story, and what appealed to me was learning about Ava and Zelda, and their incredibly strange family. There is a twist towards the end of the book, but I had figured it out by about half way through the read. Having said that, I enjoyed this book in that it hooked me and I looked forward to reading it every day. I was fascinated by the characters and their crazy lives, and I couldn't wait to find out the truth about why Zelda was doing what she was doing. Lovers of traditional, fast paced, racy thrillers may not love this one as it's definitely slower, but I was still hooked!

My Rating: * * * *

Publication Date: June 2017 (South Africa)

Genre: Thriller

Format: Trade paperback

Source: Review copy received from the publisher. Many thanks to author, Caite Dolan-Leach and Penguin Random House SA for my copy. It was my pleasure to read and review this title.