Rain of Ruin: The stirring account of a young woman's life as a clerk for the Top Secret Manhattan Project

by Mark Kelley

The nuclear novel corporate publishers would not touch. Rain of Ruin tells the story of a young woman killed by the American atomic bomb. Based on a real-life experience, Rain of Ruin is as true as Girls of Atomic City but far more tragic. from the back cover: 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.

266 pages, Paperback

First published November 11, 2011

About the author

Mark Kelley is a veteran of more than 20 years in broadcast news, both radio and television. He has worked as a news producer, reporter, and until June, 1999, he served as main anchor for WNDU- TV in South Bend, IN.
He attended Houghton College, graduated with a BA from the State University of New York at Geneseo, and later earned an MS in Telecommunications and a Ph.D. in Mass Communications from the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University.
Kelley has taught at Goshen College in Indiana, Syracuse University, the University of Maine in Orono, the New England School of Communications in Bangor, ME, and Millersville University (PA).
He is the author of five books: a novel, Berman’s Lament (2000, available from the author), a non-fiction book, Engaging News Media: A Practical Guide for People of Faith (2006, available from Amazon), Rain of Ruin (2011, available from Amazon ). and This Mere Existence: Motivation and Strategies for Restoring Human Rights (2018, available from Amazon). His biography of Lydia Hamilton Smith, mixed-race companion, partner, and so much more of Pennsylvania Congressman Thaddeus Stevens in the mid-nineteenth century, "An Uncommon Woman" is expected to be out from Penn State University Press by November 10, 2023. Once one of the most widely known women in the country, Lydia Hamilton Smith faded from view (with help from racists like Thomas Dixon and D.W. Griffith). "An Uncommon Woman" is the author's contribution to winning Mrs. Smith the prominent place in US history that she deserves.
Contact the author: kelleymark2@gmail.com, 24 S. West End Ave., Lancaster, PA 17603

Reviews

[David Leger · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found the story to be engaging and thought provoking, giving a new viewpoint to the atomic weapons program during the war. The characters were well developed and I cared about them. I would have given this book 4 stars had it not been for the final chapter. The story made a point and stood on its own, without the railing against all things nuclear at the end. To me, this tarnished the memory of the story I'd just read.