YA mystery, but could read as middle grade. Deals with a lot of issues like parent death, parent abandonment, stealing, breaking and entering, reckless behavior, friendship ins & outs, etc. The idea of the book is awesome - I love a good mystery, especially from a dead letter office! Jumping back and forth through timelines though didn't work as cohesively as I think it should have. Solid read though.

While she never wanted to leave the town of Warwick, Brodie isn't quite sure what her reception will be when she returns four years later to live with her grandmother after getting kicked out of her boarding school. She anticipates a less than warm reception due to a number of mishaps in her youth, the most serious of which was being accused of stealing a precious town artifact known as the Adder Stone. She didn't steal the stone, but she did lose one of her two best friends. At a loss for how to fix the friendship, she turns to solving the mystery of what actually happened to the Adder Stone and discovering the real identities of those who wrote the love letters left in the Dead Letter Office run by her grandmother.

This is a lovely piece of YA fiction that touches on a number of important themes including friendship, found family, romance, death, and grief. The juggling of all these themes is done relatively seamlessly through the incorporation of chapters from Brodie's point of view and passages from the mystery letter writers. I love the evolution of the friendships between Brodie, Elliot, and Levi. Brodie and Elliot pick up where they left while things between Brodie and Levi remain more complicated due to the mystery of the Adder Stone's disappearance (Levi's dad is in law enforcement and his mom in local politics) and their budding romance. All of these characters are also dealing with loss and/or neglect in their own way, whether a parent has died, is physically absent, emotionally withholding, or a complete mystery. This is, to a degree, balanced out by the unconditional love (and coolness) of Brodie's grandma and Elliot's mom's love. The mystery element of the stone and the letters is fun with the stakes becoming increasingly high due to reward money and deeper town secrets.