The nuclear novel corporate publishers would not touch.

Rain of Ruin is the story of a young woman killed by the American atomic bomb. As true as Girls of Atomic City, Rain of Ruin, based on a real-life experience, is even more tragic.

Military leaders and historians have told the story of the atomic bomb. But the official accounts never focus on the thousands of ordinary Americans who helped make it happen. Rain of Ruin tells the story from their point of view for the first time. It follows Agnes Jenkins Flaherty, an eighteen-year-old country girl, as she takes her devout religious faith and towering sense of responsibility to wartime Washington, D.C. to work with the Manhattan Project. She quickly finds love in the city, but her budding romance is overshadowed by a growing sense of terror when she learns, from the Top Secret documents crossing her desk, that project scientists think setting off the bomb might destroy the earth. Agnes escapes that prospect, but not the heartbreaking disappointment and tragedy that follow.

Mark Kelley lives in Orono, Maine with his wife, Marty. After more than twenty-five years as a professional journalist, he earned his Ph.D. from the Newhouse School at Syracuse University, and is now the Director of Journalism at the New England School of Communications in Bangor, Maine. He has covered the news in many places. But this is the first time his reporting has been personal. Rain of Ruin is based on his mother's real-life experience.