The Physicists’ Daughter

Evans (the Faye Longchamp Mysteries) underwhelms in this standalone historical. In 1944, Justine Byrne, the eponymous character whose physicist parents died in a car accident before Pearl Harbor, works a menial job manufacturing boats, ships, and airplanes in New Orleans for the war effort. Her contributions are mundane, but that changes after a crane collapses at work, crushing three fellow employees and killing one of them. Byrne begins to suspect the collapse was not an accident but industrial sabotage, part of a pattern she’d noticed involving rumors she’d heard about missing tools and other plant disruptions. Evans doesn’t build any suspense over whether Justine’s fears are justified, as sections told from the perspective of a spy code-named Mudcat sap any sense of excitement from Byrne’s search for the truth, and the prose is often subpar (“The German language would always be there at the riverbed of his innermost self, where his subconscious mind would feed on it like a broad, silent mudcat”). Evans has done better. (June)