Dead Letters: New Netflix Series looks at the upcoming adaptation of Dead Letters by Cate Dolan Leach. This suspenseful story about a woman searching for her missing twin will be coming to Netflix soon. This is a plot summary of the book Dead Letters and I’ll update it with news about the show!
Dead Letters: New Netflix Series
Table of Contents
- Main Characters in Dead Letters
- Plot summary of Dead Letters by Cate Dolan Leach
- A to Z clues in Dead Letters
- Information on the Netflix Series Dead Letters
Main Characters in Dead Letters
- Ava Antipova: grad student living in Paris
- Zelda Antipova: Ava’s identical twin
- Nadine O’Connor: the twins’ mother, suffering from alcohol abuse disorder
- Marlon Antipova: the twins’ father who has remarried
- Wyatt Darling: Ava’s ex boyfriend
- Kayla Richardson: Zelda’s friend
- Jason: friend of Zelda
- Nina: Nadine’s younger sister; died when she was ten
Plot Summary for Dead Letters by Cate Dolan Leach
Ava gets an email from her mother saying that her sister Zelda was killed in a barn fire.
Ava left home to go to grad school in Paris. Zelda lived on her mother Nadine’s property and was her caretaker. Nadine suffers from early onset dementia and is often confused and agitated.
After flying to the Finger Lakes NY region, Ava learns about the fire. They have not yet recovered Zelda’s body. And the barn was chained from the outside.
The twins were not speaking after Zelda slept with Wyatt, her sister’s high school boyfriend.
Ava looks in her sister’s favorite hiding place and finds a phone. When the phone receives an email from Zelda to Ava, Ava understands: this is a scavenger hunt.
Each alphabetical clue offers new information about Zelda and the family’s situation. (See the full list below.)
The hunt starts at a nearby vineyard, where Ava learns that Zelda owed the proprietor $100,000 for a tractor. At the bank, she discovers that her family has a $300,000 loan against the vineyard that is two months’ past due.
When the police recover remains from the barn, they collect Ava’s DNA.
Ava is still convinced her sister is alive.
The police also reveal that Zelda was in Paris three months before. But why?
Ava finds Zelda’s heroin stash in their American Girl doll collection.
Another clue leads her to a strip club a stripper named Holly, and a guy named Jason.
Ava is accosted by a guy named Kyle Richardson, who is looking for his missing sister, Kayla. Is Kayla the body in the barn? Is Zelda still in Paris?
The police tell Ava that they have found teeth in the barn. The coroner is ruling that the person died by homicide.
Ava wonders if Zelda faked her death to commit insurance fraud and pay off the family debt. She discovers that Zelda replaced her mom’s medication with Xanax and Vicodin, a combination that would likely kill her.
Dead Letters: the Ending Explained
Nadine never recovered from watching her older sister drown in the lake. This trauma, in conjunction with a family predisposition toward alcohol abuse, contributed to her chronic drinking.
Nadine’s autopsy revealed that her dementia was a syndrome caused by her alcohol abuse. If correctly diagnosed, this deficiency could have been cured with thiamine. As Ava and Nadine are out on the lake, Nadine has a seizure and dies.
Zelda took her own life. She took Xanax and Vicodin, locked the barn from outside, and then climbed in a window and started the fire.
Zelda feared she was developing the same dementia as her mother. She scheduled all the emails to the phone that Ava found and asked Kayla to do errands that would make it seem like Zelda was alive.
Alphabetic Clues in Dead Letters
- A: Ava
- B: Bartoletti Vineyards
- C: Credit Union
- D: Debt
- E: Eulogy
- F: Facebook
- G: Grandma
- H: Holly
- I: Intimacy
- J: Jason
- K: Kuma’s strip club
- L: L-O-V-E song by Nat King Cole
- M: Marlon
- N: Nadine
- O: ouija board
- P: passport
- Q: a Sesame Street video > Marlon’s fishing pole
- R
- S: symptoms
- T: Truth
- U: unlocked phone
- V: Vicodin
- W: Wyatt or Wine
- X: Xanax
- Y: Why
- Z: Zelda
What We Know About Dead Letters on Netflix
Announced in April 2025: Netflix will be developing Dead Letters, Caite Dolan Leach’s 2017 novel in conjunction with Alex Cooper’s (Call Her Daddy) production company.
This Deadline article describes Dead Letters as “an addictive whodunit-meets-psychological thriller” centered on a pair of identical twin sisters, Ava and Zelda, played by Lucy Hale from Pretty Little Liars.
Will they change the book and/or the ending? We will see.