Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature winner Stacey Lee's Heiress of Nowhere is a sprawling mystery anchored by the thoughtful research and skilled craft that has become the hallmark of Lee's work.
In 1900, an infant was found in a canoe near Orcas Island, Wash. She was taken in by shipbuilder Dakon Sanders, given the name Lucy, and raised on his expansive estate, Nowhere. Now 18, Lucy plans to leave Nowhere, but Sanders offers to reveal information about her father if Lucy will stay. He is murdered before he can share it and leaves his business and property not to his presumptive heir but to Lucy. To keep the inheritance, Lucy must absolve herself of Sanders's murder and find the true culprit in a crime she discovers is connected to her own identity.
Heiress of Nowhere cements Lee's place as one of YA's finest historical fiction writers. Her strength is braiding thoroughly researched details of place, time, and culture into suspenseful, character-driven, watertight narratives, and her gift is making it look effortless. Here, those details center on the early 20th-century Pacific Northwest and its colonization, ecology, and industrial development and exploitation. Lee (Outrun the Moon) wraps them up in one of the best sorts of mysteries, the kind where the sleuth must seek some hidden truth about themselves in addition to an external unknown and the two turn out to be linked. Readers who enjoy historical mysteries by Ruta Sepetys, June Hur, and Monica Hesse will want to book passage to Nowhere posthaste. --Stephanie Appell, freelance book reviewer