The Woman Detective: A Sherry Russell Thriller

Huntsville, Alabama, 1968, is a company town. The company being NASA-the NASA of the Apollo Program, the Space Race, the Cold War contest to land an American on the moon before the decade was out, and beat the Soviets to the punch. NASA was the company the public knew about, everybody acknowledged. But there was another, veiled below the facade of Rocket City, U.S.A., lurking and monstrous… Southern Noir heroine Sherry Russell is a newly divorced, 28-year-old former nurse, turned private detective in 1960s Nashville. Daughter of a newspaper editor, Sherry is well into an investigation targeting dangerous diet pills and fat doctors across Tennessee, when she’s hired by Buzz Hutcheson, an outlandish business mogul poised to dive into politics. He was a bomber squadron commander in WWII England, and one of his kids, a pilot in his old squadron, has been murdered-maybe-en route with evidence of a Nazi conspiracy. Taking the case, Sherry birddogs her way to Pennsylvania, then Ohio, then Huntsville, whose leading citizen is Mr. Space himself, celebrated German rocket scientist Wernher von Braun. There, teaming with a diminutive British ex-pat nurse, and an natty FBI man with more of Sherry on his mind than just her case, the woman detective goes undercover as a courtesan, and finds herself body-slammed by an infernal beauty queen-the reigning Miss Nazi! Like NASA, its occult counterpart also goes by an acronym: ODESSA. Organisation der ehemaligen SS-Anghoerigen. AKA, the Organization of Former Members of the SS.