The Altar Girl

This harrowing prequel to the Nadia Tesla series, which began with 2013’s The Boy from Reactor 4, focuses on a severely dysfunctional family saturated with Ukranian angst. Nadia and her brother, Marko, grew up in America, but their parents never overcame the anguish of being displaced persons after WWII. Now Marko is the drunken owner of a strip club in eastern Connecticut, and though Nadia has become an overachieving New York financial analyst, she still suffers from low self-esteem and feels a need to prove herself to her immigrant community. That’s why she stubbornly insists that her godfather’s fatal fall down his cellar steps in Hartford was not an accident, even when almost everyone else is willing to accept the official verdict and a vicious Ukranian-American thug threatens her. Although the book’s foreground characters sometimes feel flat, the cultural background is fascinating. (Mar.)