New Release & Excerpt – Tangles by Kay Smith-Blum
Synopsis
“In a well-crafted debut, Smith-Blum provides the reader a ringside seat to the birth of the nuclear age…a beautifully written, important story…Tangles packs a punch and hits close to home.” -Robert Dugoni, New York Times bestselling author of The Tracy Crosswhite Series
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.
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Excerpt
When my mother came to Boston in 1950 to visit me at grad school—MIT—and shared the news that Mary had been declared missing, I was too far away to help with the search. But an inane longing had lured me back to this spot. A place where she was nowhere to be found.
Harry’s crab shack occupied the midpoint of the longest pier on the sandy side of Baker Bay. I set aside thoughts of a possible cancer diagnosis, as well as treatments that wouldn’t lead to a cure and guaranteed unwelcome side effects in favor of cracked crab, a far safer choice than fish spawned in the Columbia. The walk along the weathered planks took me well beyond the shoreline to the depths that housed a legendary undertow.
What looked to be a mass of red hair bobbed on the far side of a dinghy floating near the pier pilings. A boy in the boat clutched at the oars receding into the brine. On the water’s surface, fiery tendrils strayed in all directions, undermining any defined center. A tangled mass, dry to my eye, as if the wet of the entire ocean could not tame it.
The boat, the boy, and the copper-red tresses drifted under the pier. I galloped to the other side to spot them, oddly frantic. The water at the tide line had turned winter cool, fair warning to swimmers.
The dinghy poked out below me, its bow pointed toward the shore. A blanket, it must have been folded before, bundled up what seemed to be another child in the boat. The red mane obscured the face, but I guessed she was maybe seven or eight.
Harry stepped out of the shack’s back door, handed me a mug of coffee, and leaned over the rail. “Ah, the boy’s coming in.” I raised a brow in query and Harry said, “I loan him the dinghy ever so often.”
“How can anyone be out in that cold?”
Harry shrugged. “The boy stays in the boat.” Harry motioned toward my Impala, parked at the edge of the pier. “Need a ride home, I reckon.”
“How far?”
“Too far to walk before dark. A couple of rises over.”
The hills began about a mile beyond the shore, rising above the Columbia’s mouth. My cabin rested on the first one, just beyond the Washington hamlet of Naselle. Only a few tract houses and an abandoned development scattered across the bare, rolling terrain. An area I deemed suspect and where every drink of water should be questioned, but few folks knew anything of the real havoc wrought by the Hanford nuclear plant three hundred miles away.
The scientists at the inception of nuclear production had believed that errant, airborne radioactive emissions would just float up and away, and never reach this far. The Hanford engineers had submerged the irradiated fuel slugs underwater in large tanks, creating a barrier between the engineers and the slugs. A faulty uranium slug could necessitate a shutdown, and engineers would scramble to remove it before damage was done to the hardware or worse, a uranium fire erupted. They dumped any ruptured slugs into more water to cool. The effluent was flushed into the Columbia, a circuitous path, but one that led to the sea.
The boy, a redhead too, pulled the dinghy up on the sand above the tide. The girl hid behind the blanket before breaking free of it, the light turning her luminous. Her clothing puffed out in the breeze, completely dry, as if never immersed at all. I shook my head at the thought of it, figuring she must have been swimming naked and the clothes donned after she climbed aboard. The boy shook the sand from the blanket while the girl stayed back, a step or so behind him. He folded the blanket and placed it back into the skiff.
Harry waved, and the boy lifted his hand. He climbed the ladder from sea level, the girl almost overlapping him like a shadow. As he swung a leg over the rail, I caught a glimpse of her face. The shock of their faces, side by side, rocked me. Familial look-alikes. Twins except for the age difference, the boy older, maybe by five or six years.
About the Author
An Austin, TX transplant and lifetime environmental advocate, Kay Smith-Blum has resided in Seattle for more than four decades. Since selling a family-owned high-end fashion business in 2016, history buff Smith-Blum spends her days creating stories set in the mid-20th century. The recent upheaval over leaking waste tanks at the Hanford site in Washington state compelled her to write a Hanford story in a way that would educate and entertain readers, resulting in her debut novel, Tangles. A companion short story to Tangles is featured in the 2024 anthology, Feisty Deeds: Historical Fictions of Daring Women, which Smith-Blum co-edited. She has published a variety of other short works that can be found in multiple literary journals. Smith-Blum works out her writer’s block in her sons’ gardens and the nearest lap pool.
