Medea's Daughter

Graduating in 1970 with a degree in mechanical engineering, Danielle Wheelock lands a plum job at Mannheim Construction, Inc., in San Francisco. She moves into a group house on Haight Street, ground zero for the Summer of Love from 1967, and begins her career as a professional engineer. But her first assignment is more clerical than professional: tracking rebar shipments in the foundation of a nuclear power plant that Mannheim is building in Tennessee. When she discovers an anomaly that leads to the project being canceled, her career takes a sideways skid. Dani ends up in engineering purgatory-a support group doing estimating and scheduling for the projects that other engineers would get to design and build-and it looks like her bright future has dimmed almost to extinction. But Dani still hungers to create something big and meaningful. As if stepping out of her dreams, a French hydrologist with backing from the Saudi government brings Mannheim a juicy proposal to capture icebergs in the Antarctic and haul them up to the Red Sea port of Jeddah. It turns out the only person who can make this scheme work both technically and economically is Dani, who has a creative spin on handling the bergs. She leaps at the chance to get in on the ground floor of a project to make the desert bloom. Dani quits her position at Mannheim and joins in partnership with the Frenchman and the Saudi prince who is behind the deal. Will the iceberg project be her rescue or become her doom? Dani must work harder than ever to find out. This third novel in The Judge's Daughter series, timed soon after the close of The Professor's Mistress, follows the third generation of the Wheelock family and its passage from small-town dealings in central Pennsylvania into the modern world of international engineering and construction ... and other businesses that are far less savory.