Marley Chambers, races through a driving rain to reach her dying father's bedside. She makes it in time to hear his murmured last words-a Hebrew prayer. Marley is shocked. Her parents raised her without a devotion to religion or the existence of God.

Then, as she and her childhood friend Vivian are cleaning out her father's desk, they find a secret compartment that contains a letter to Marley. The letter offers Marley a choice: learn the truth about her family's past or carry on with her life unchanged. With Vivian's encouragement, Marley chooses to read on.

Vivian and Marley, for all their differences, have one thing in common: their love of Nancy Drew novels. Now the friends feel like they're in one of those wonderful mysteries as this puzzling letter leads them to a hidden door that opens onto a secret room containing some of Marley's parents' possessions-and the truth about her family's past.

Now Marley must confront a new reality, one forged in the fires that burned across Europe a generation earlier. Will coping with that secret give Marley the courage to confess her own hidden truth?