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|summary=In this intriguing, engaging novel, a London teenager flies to Los Angeles to attend her mother's funeral. Arriving just too late, she walks into the drug and drink-fuelled wake. Impulsively, she steals a suitcase of letters in order to track down the men who sent them. Perhaps in this way she can discover the mother she never knew.

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The phone call came when she was 17. Her mother had died; the mother who had just been a flimsy memory of a touch, an impression and a faded photograph. Not satisfied with her father and grandma's biased recollections of 'the slut', she steals her step-mother's credit card and catches a flight to the funeral in Los Angeles. Unfortunately she arrives too late for the funeral, but finding the pink hotel her mother owned, she walks in on the wake. Rooms full of drunken, drug-sodden eyes stare at her whilst she makes her way through the building to what must have been her mother's bedroom. It's then she decides, as her step-father lies, semi-consciousness, on the bed. She takes some of her mother's clothes, shoes and letters. Once she has a chance to read them, she realises they're cards and love letters from men who may be able to build her a picture of the woman who gave her life but not a lot else.