From the author of The Dressmaker's Dowry. In the 1940s young women, winners of beauty contests and dance competitions, flocked to Hollywood with stars in their eyes. Violet Harcourt seems to have disappeared there without a trace. Sixty years later, a young woman sets out to discover what happened to Violet on that long ago summer.

"In the final months of World War II, San Francisco newspaper secretary Ellie Morgan should be planning her wedding and subsequent exit from the newsroom into domestic life. Instead, Ellie, who harbors dreams of having her own column, is using all the skills she's learned as a would-be reporter to try to uncover any scrap of evidence that her missing pilot father is still alive. But when she discovers a stack of love letters from a woman who is not...