When she's fired from her job during the latest recession, a young Canadian woman flees across the ocean to Nice, France. As she struggles to write a novel, she begins penning letters to her good friend Margaret, who becomes an unwitting audience to our heroine's adventures across the pond. She crosses paths first with Cynthia L. Taylor, an American tourist, and then, with the charming and mysterious Mathias de Bretteville. What begins as a fairy tale, however, soon spins into a darker yarn when she follows Mathias north, to his ancestral home in Denmark-and a past that he has yet to bury. V.M. Parker's debut novel combines the epistolary novel with elements of gothic romance and modern moral debates. The result is a unique and moving read, from start to finish.