{"id":7633,"date":"2025-07-19T08:35:07","date_gmt":"2025-07-19T08:35:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/7633\/"},"modified":"2025-07-19T08:35:07","modified_gmt":"2025-07-19T08:35:07","slug":"letters-from-the-past-deliver-deadly-message-winnipeg-free-press","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/7633\/","title":{"rendered":"Letters from the past deliver deadly message \u2013 Winnipeg Free Press"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Dear Future Me, bestselling U.K. author Deborah O\u2019Connor (My Husband\u2019s Son, The Dangerous Kind and The Captive) dredges up past secrets for a group of former classmates, with fatal consequences for one of them.<\/p>\n

In the small North Yorkshire village of Saltburn, Audrey Hawken and her cohort receive letters they wrote when they were teenagers to their future selves, thanks to the English teacher who assigned them in class and mails them 20 years later.<\/p>\n

Audrey discovers in hers a note from her friend Ben, who died on a school trip weeks after writing his letter. Mystified, she texts her picture-of-success friend Miranda what Ben wrote; but she never gets a response.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Dear
\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

Dear Future Me<\/p>\n

Miranda, upon reading her own letter to herself along with Audrey\u2019s message, walks out of her home without a word to her family. The next time we see her she is plummeting to her death from the heights at Huntcliff.<\/p>\n

The tragedy shocks the community, especially Audrey \u2014 Miranda was one of few friends she stayed close with.<\/p>\n

Audrey\u2019s life isn\u2019t what her teen self had imagined. After her parents\u2019 deaths she raised her younger brother, failed to get into Cambridge and now works cleaning homes \u2014 including that of her former peer, overachiever Kitty, a renowned professor.<\/p>\n

Audrey is driven by grief to uncover the truth about Miranda\u2019s death and its connection to Ben\u2019s 20 years earlier.<\/p>\n

O\u2019Connor\u2019s prose is crisp and vivid. When Audrey\u2019s investigative dead ends pile up, she feels her \u201cinadequacies press down on her like gravity, pushing lower and lower, until she feels she might disappear into the ground itself.\u201d<\/p>\n

Excerpts from the letters deepen the mystery, uncovering the characters\u2019 past connections. But although presented in fonts emulating handwriting, the narrative voice sounds the same, as if the characters as teens are really their adult selves describing them. They admit things that ring true psychologically (such as the headmaster\u2019s son acting out just so his distant father will pay attention to him) but often in analytical terms with the benefit of hindsight.<\/p>\n

Having a struggling-to-pay-the-bills cleaning woman as her sleuth means O\u2019Connor could have thrown drudgery to the wind and let the mystery relentlessly drive events. Instead she builds tension in a more true-to-life and satisfying way. Audrey juggles her efforts to find her former friends and discover the truth of Ben\u2019s death \u2014 and Miranda\u2019s \u2014 with taking paid gigs wherever she can, sometimes putting her up close with people she\u2019s investigating.<\/p>\n

The discomfort of relying on her successful former classmates while learning their secrets leads to more shocks along the way, exposing the brittleness of social mobility and past dreams \u2014 for Audrey, and her friends.<\/p>\n

One dramatic revelation about Miranda makes it seem Audrey has cracked the mystery \u2014 and it shows O\u2019Connor\u2019s storytelling skill that, while it\u2019s stunning enough to satisfy Audrey (and perhaps the reader, for a moment), it\u2019s still not the whole story.<\/p>\n

With its high-concept premise, intersecting lives and picturesque, semirural English setting \u2014 not to mention O\u2019Connor\u2019s own experience as TV writer and producer \u2014 don\u2019t be surprised if this mystery makes for a captivating series to stream.<\/p>\n

David J\u00f3n Fuller is a Winnipeg writer and editor. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"In Dear Future Me, bestselling U.K. author Deborah O\u2019Connor (My Husband\u2019s Son, The Dangerous Kind and The Captive)…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7634,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[353,49,48,75],"class_list":{"0":"post-7633","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-ca","10":"tag-canada","11":"tag-entertainment"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7633","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7633"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7633\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7634"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7633"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7633"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7633"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}