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... "If you loved the smart women of Lessons in Chemistry and Hidden Figures then this is for you." --Rhys Bowen, New York Times bestselling author 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.