The Physicists' Daughter: A Novel

by Mary Anna Evans

Overview

Perfect for fans of The Alice Network and Kate Quinn, The Physicists' Daughter is "a fascinating and intelligent WWII home front story." —Rhys Bowen, New York Times bestselling author of The Venice Sketchbook.

No one can be trusted. The fate of a country is at stake. And everything depends on the physicists' daughter.

New Orleans, 1944.

Sabotage. That's the word on factory worker Justine Byrne's mind as she is repeatedly called to weld machine parts that keep failing with no clear cause. Could someone inside the secretive Carbon Division be deliberately undermining the factory's Allied war efforts?

Raised by her late parents to think logically, she also can't help wondering just what the oddly shaped carbon gadgets she assembles day after day have to do with the boats the factory builds. When a crane inexplicably crashes to the factory floor, leaving a woman dead, Justine can no longer ignore her nagging fear that German spies are at work within the building, trying to put the factory and its workers out of commission.

Unable to trust anyone—not the charming men vying for her attention, not her unpleasant boss, and not even the women who work beside her—Justine draws on the legacy of her unconventional upbringing to keep her division running and protect her coworkers, her country, and herself from a war that is suddenly very close to home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781464215568
Publisher:	Sourcebooks
Publication date:	06/07/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
Sales rank:	74,041
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Mary Anna Evans is the author of the Faye Longchamp archaeological mysteries, which have received recognition including the Benjamin Franklin Award, the Mississippi Author Award, and three Florida Book Awards bronze medals. She is an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches fiction and nonfiction writing. Winner of the 2018 Sisters in Crime (SinC) Academic Research Grant

Editorial Reviews

04/18/2022

Evans (the Faye Longchamp Mysteries) underwhelms in this standalone historical. In 1944, Justine Byrne, the eponymous character whose physicist parents died in a car accident before Pearl Harbor, works a menial job manufacturing boats, ships, and airplanes in New Orleans for the war effort. Her contributions are mundane, but that changes after a crane collapses at work, crushing three fellow employees and killing one of them. Byrne begins to suspect the collapse was not an accident but industrial sabotage, part of a pattern she’d noticed involving rumors she’d heard about missing tools and other plant disruptions. Evans doesn’t build any suspense over whether Justine’s fears are justified, as sections told from the perspective of a spy code-named Mudcat sap any sense of excitement from Byrne’s search for the truth, and the prose is often subpar (“The German language would always be there at the riverbed of his innermost self, where his subconscious mind would feed on it like a broad, silent mudcat”). Evans has done better. (June)

Publishers Weekly

"With its smart, Rosie-the-Riveter heroine and intriguing wartime mystery, The Physicists’ Daughter is a fresh and fascinating glimpse of life on the American home front during WWII. Replete with spies, saboteurs, and save-the-day scientists, the book is a page-turning adventure that sparked my mind and opened my heart. I never wanted the story to end!" — Amanda Skenandore, author of The Second Life of Mirielle West

"A fascinating and intelligent WWII home front story with a smart heroine who uses her upbringing and knowledge of physics to protect a US factory from a traitor." — Rhys Bowen, New York Times bestselling author of two historical mystery series as well as several internationally bestselling historical novels, including The Venice Sketchbook

From the Publisher