Pen Pal

The book begins at a funeral. The narrator's husband has just been buried, and a letter arrives that day, posted from a prison, containing a single line and signed with a name she does not know. She answers it out of curiosity and asks the man what he is waiting for, and his reply is that he is waiting for her. He insists they have met and she insists they have not, and the exchange continues weekly and becomes steadily more personal. Then the letters stop arriving, and by the time the narrator finds out why, the man who signed them is already at her door.

The book is a romance and a mystery at once, and the letters are how the two of them meet.