Oppenheimer was just the beginning.

When a harpooned whale offers proof the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is endangering all life in the Columbia River Basin, Luke Hinson, a brash young scientist, seizes the chance to avenge his father’s death but a thyroid cancer diagnosis derails Luke’s research. Between treatments, he dives back in, making enemies at every turn. On an overnight trek, Luke discovers evidence that Mary, his former neighbor, embarked on the same treacherous trail, and her disappearance, a decade prior, may be tied to Hanford’s harmful practices mired in government-mandated secrecy.

A love story wrapped in a mystery, this stunning Cold War home-front tale reveals the devastating costs of the birth of the nuclear age, and celebrates the quiet courage of wronged women, the fierce determination of fatherless sons, and the limitless power of the individual.

Tangles is a genre-defying must-read for our time.

The year is 1944. The United States is convinced that the Nazis, wrongly, as it turned out, are racing to construct an atomic bomb and are determined to build one first. The Hanford Engineer Works in south-central Washington State is a crucial part of that effort, where the Manhattan Project feverishly tries to extract enough plutonium to make a usable weapon. It is here that part of the story in Tangles takes place.

Mary Boone is desperate to escape a loveless, abusive marriage, but that’s problematic in a world where she needs her husband’s signature to take money out of the bank. Converting nickels, dimes, and quarters into bills takes some time, but she’s determined. Beatings and money are not all that worry Mary. There’s growing evidence that plutonium production at Hanford is slowly poisoning workers and their families and is spreading to nearby areas as well. But discussing or especially publicizing the danger is verboten in America’s nuclear weapons industry. Suddenly, in 1950, Mary disappears.

Twenty years later, in the early 1960s, Luke Hinson, Mary’s former next-door neighbor, uses Hanford’s ecological damage as the basis for a PhD thesis. He soon learns two things. One, he has, like many other residents of the area, developed thyroid cancer. And two, the passage of two decades has done virtually nothing to lift the veil of secrecy surrounding the dangers of America’s first industrial-scale plutonium plant.

While Tangles is fiction, it is well-grounded in fact. It is well-documented that the United States took an alarmingly casual attitude toward nuclear waste, its disposal, and radioactive fallout. Although specific radioactivity readings and biological effects in the book may be fictionalized, one could dig up similar incidents and situations that did occur.

This debut novel from Kay Smith-Blum is a gripping story. The historical element sets a disturbing background as Mary and a small band of people (and, later, Luke) try to find a way to spread the truth about the damage the Hanford site is doing to the people who work there. I had difficulty putting the book down.

Kay Smith-Blum is a former business owner and Seattle School Board President. A lover of the natural world and an avid gardener, Smith-Blum founded Environmental Endeavors, the first greenhouse program in Seattle Public Schools.

A fan of mid-20th-century history, Smith-Blum has penned two other manuscripts set in Texas, but the recent upheaval over leaking waste tanks at the Hanford site drew her in. A meticulous researcher, Smith-Blum felt compelled to write the Hanford story in a way that would educate and entertain readers. The result is her debut novel, TANGLES, coming December 3, 2024.

Smith-Blum’s published short works may be found in multiple literary journals. A companion short story to TANGLES is included in the 2024 anthology (a compilation that Smith-Blum co-edited), Feisty Deeds: Historical Fictions of Daring Women. Named the Western WA Woman Business Owner in 2013, Smith-Blum has lived in Washington State for four decades. She works out her writer’s block in her sons’ gardens and the nearest lap pool.