When an unidentified body is pulled from a murky swimming pool in Oak Ridge, police call Body Farm founder Bill Brockton for help. With and his graduate assistant, Miranda Lovelady, Brockton determines that the elderly victim didn’t drown; he was a victim of radiation poisoning. As they begin to search for answers, the forensic detectives discover the victim was Dr. Leonard Novak, a renowned Manhattan Project physicist and the inventor of a plutonium reactor used in atomic bombs. As Brockton struggles to cut through the Gordian knot of Manhattan Project history, he finds a charming and utterly unreliable guide to help him wade through wartime Oak Ridge: 90-year-old Beatrice Montgomery. As his witness drifts between lucidity and dementia, Brockton isn’t sure if what Beatrice reveals is fact or fancy, history or myth. Unfortunately, she’s the only one who can help him solve the case. But what Beatrice cannot—or will not—tell, is whether the tale she tells is true or false . . . or s