It’s the late nineties and Steph Ellis has moved from Brisbane to Hollywood. There she falls into the clutches of Lizzy Mars, star of the teen drama Secret Vampire.
Lizzy and her twin brother Monty are fascinated by their uncle, Boris Mars, an auteur who died in a distant era called the eighties. Steph and the twins discover his letters of love and yearning, but mysteriously, they seem to have been written after his death. And at night, a shadowy figure stalks the trees behind the Mars family home, as if Boris Mars is the time-travelling monster that inspired Secret Vampire.
When scandal derails the TV show, the Mars family unceremoniously dump Steph from their lives. But before she returns to Australia, she’s possessed to bury Boris’s letters under the pool house.
Twenty-three years later and Secret Vampire is being rebooted – there’s a cure for vampirism now. Lizzy seizes the opportunity to lure her estranged brother and Steph back to the dilapidated Mars house, hoping to find the lost letters and restore some family glory. But if Steph returns to exhume the letters, what else will she be digging up?
Spanning decades and continents, divorces and hook-ups, Letter to a Fortunate Ex is a literary mystery about grief, shame and lust. It’s funny and sexy, but also a bit twisted – like reading a love letter meant for someone else.