THE HANFORD NECKLACE

In St. Hilaire’s novel, an ailing young woman moves in with her grandmother and uncovers chilling secrets about her family and their work for the Manhattan Project.

In August 2013, 23-year-old Saige O’Toole is unable to maintain her job because a mysterious illness has left her physically and emotionally depleted. Now living with her widowed grandmother, Rosamond Boyle O’Toole, in the Tri-Cities area of eastern Washington state, she hopes to find a doctor who will finally give her a diagnosis. Rummaging one day through Rosamond’s basement, she comes upon a box containing an intriguing piece of smooth metal that has a strange warmth. She later speaks with her aunt Susan, who’s one of Rosamond’s 12 children, and notices a fresh scar on Susan’s throat, the result of a thyroidectomy to remove her cancerous thyroid gland. The scar, Susan explains, is called a Hanford necklace (“So many people around here have had the surgery that it got itself a nickname”), named for the Hanford Manhattan Project plant that converted uranium into plutonium to create the atom bomb during World War II. When Saige returns home and researches Hanford, she learns that it’s a Superfund site—and determines that the mysterious piece of metal, secretly sequestered in the O’Toole house for decades, is a plutonium button. St. Hilaire’s frightening narrative, based upon verified historical events, alternates between the stories of Rosamond and her husband Charlie (beginning in the 1940s and going forward) and Saige’s present-day reckoning with her large, dysfunctional family and her grandparents’ involvement in the creation of plutonium. While occasionally bordering on the melodramatic, the prose vividly depicts Rosamond’s work, her volatile marriage to Charlie, and the consequences of the massive leaks of radiation into the air and the Columbia River. Weaving the many physical and psychological crises of the fictional O’Toole family storyline together with the historical effects of radiation poisoning on human and animal life surrounding Hanford, St. Hilaire spins a haunting tale of government-created tragedy and cover-up.

Historically riveting, narratively addictive, and truly disturbing.