Rocket Girl (A Kick Johnson Mystery)

A plucky, recently widowed mathematician takes a job with a new NASA-funded research center, but when a fellow employee turns up dead, things add up to murder…

Dallas, 1961. There’s a new president in the White House, a new birth control pill, and a new Russian satellite called Sputnik flying overhead. Everything’s new except Kick Johnson’s options: she’s unexpectedly on her own after three months of marriage to a man she barely knew, her car has been repossessed, and no bank will give her—or any single woman—a loan. When she answers an employment ad at the new Center for Rocket Science Research and lands a job as a math aide, her trajectory points upward—until evidence of a murder is found on the property.

The victim was an engineer who worked on the space program. His death raises questions about the safety of the center and the lengths someone will go to steal the research inside. It also highlights more personal issues like why he was at Kick’s house two days before he was killed. Now her new life involves a fair amount of deception and danger with global stakes—not to mention a surprising secret that hits painfully close to home.

As the space race heats up, Kick has to solve a formula she had no part in writing before her future—and that of the space program she’s learned to love—burns up on reentry.