Fiona Lychenko--now a woman in her late sixties--spent years researching the death of her high school classmate Zara Stanley, who was brutally murdered in the early sixties, at the age of twenty. Determined to solve the crime--something not even the police were able to do, Fiona interviewed everyone she could in her hometown of Ripley, but to no avail: every trail led to the same dead end. She even published her findings in a book, hoping it would lead to anonymous clues from readers and outliers, but to no avail. Now, a decade later, Fiona has finally given up hope that the real killer would ever be caught. That is, until a brown manila envelope turns up under the door of her Calgary condo, with one sheet of paper inside that has a set of numbers and letters on it--all cut out from newspapers and magazines. Suddenly, all of the old feelings return, and Fiona once again finds herself embroiled in the midst of a tangled controversy so intricate and delicate that one wrong move could unravel the whole thing. Based on the true story of the murder of Alexandra Wiwcharuk in 1961 in Saskatoon, Zara's Dead is the fictional retelling of a very real story, one that has captivated and eluded answers for decades.